Running Scared

Today saw the third wave in as many weeks of student action in protest at the coalition government's education cuts. Once more, universities are going into (or are continuing with) occupations, and marchers have taken to the streets across the country, despite the snow. This has obviously got someone rattled, as the police have been kettling before the fact: i.e. forcibly surrounding and detaining people as a method of intimidation, rather than as a 'defensive' measure to protect property. The tactic is, in effect, a temporary mass arrest, a temporary forced detention as a means of punishment and intimidation for daring to protest. (And if the word 'temporary' suggests a certain softness, bear in mind that being kettled at this time of year means being forced to stand in the middle of the street for as long as six hours, forced to stand in freezing winter weather and to piss on the road because there is nowhere else to go.) Of course, this is no different to what the cops were doing before, but last week in London, the sacrificial police van was strategically placed so as to give an excuse for the kettle: blur the chronology, ensure lots of photos get taken of the poor innocent van, and you've got the licence to scare, bully and physically tangle with schoolkids. This week, though, the cops (or their superiors) don't seem to have been as bothered about how they were perceived: or, perhaps, the protestors out-witted them, denying them the propaganda upper hand by running away when they saw the vast police presence and spreading throughout the city in a kind of psychogeographic protest dérive. After all, it's hard to present people as violent protestors when they're running away from hordes of uniformed policemen in riot gear...

Beyond the specifics of what happened today, what's crucial at this stage is that the momentum is kept up - and so far, there are still thousands of people turning up to vent their frustation and outrage, which the police intimidation and the almost universal equivocation and condemnation of the protests from the mainstream media seems only to have fuelled. A related danger is the hijacking of the movement by bureaucracy and by parties who will negotiate only token compromises, sucking the real life and energy of the movement (i.e. down on the streets with the slogans and placards); because, in fact, seeing so many people who just will not take the shit they are being forced to swallow really has got the government intimidated, caused sweat patches to emerge on 'Dave' Cameron's fashionably tie-less shirt. There's thus no reason that we have to assume they have the 'upper hand'. Finally, some sort of connection with broader concerns about the government's policies must be established - otherwise, it will easy to dismiss the protestors as just a load of selfish/ priviliged/ naive students moaning away, unlike 'real people' who have to hold down jobs and take care of families, etc etc. There's a wave of public outrage just waiting to be tapped into - from those forced onto the dole and made to feel like shit for not beeing able to find a job in a climate which makes that task harder than ever day by day; from those at risk from cuts to public services; from those who don't actually belive in the neo-liberal agenda and still have some sense of social justice. That wave is what the student protest movement can and must recognise, stir up and engage with. After the initial surge of excitement about what happened at Millbank and elsewhere, the next few weeks will be crucial.

The Idea of an Alternative: Further Student Protests, 24.11.10

Richard Seymour calls it the “biggest student rebellion since ’68,” and, whether or not one thinks of that as an exaggeration, something does seem to be in the air at the moment. Yesterday saw students across the UK stage a wave of occupations, walkouts, and marches in protest at the proposed increased in tuition fees, the scrapping of the EMA (Educational Maintenance Allowance), the marketisation of education, the decimation of Arts and Humanities…

Unlike the recent NUS-organised march, of which the attack on Tory HQ at 30 Millbank was a (large) off-shoot, rather than an intended consequence, this seems to have arisen from a spontaneous, only loosely organised, desire on the part of a crowd of mostly young people – again, many on their first protest, buoyed by the fact that so many of their fellow students had walked out with them from classes, lectures and seminars at 11AM, and further enraged/ encouraged, rather than cowed, by heavy-handed police tactics (charging protestors with horses, establishing a kettle in which thousands of people were trapped for hours on end with little access to water and sanitation, in the freezing cold of the British winter, and, reportedly, physically assaulting teenaged protestors).

Why did the police act as they did? Their actions indicate that they (or their leaders) were severely rattled by what happened at Millbank; after the flak they received for their handling of the G20 protests, they had to appear a little ‘kinder’, perhaps, but they also had some licence to ‘crack down’ given the way the media had painted the Millbank protestors as dangerous anarchist troublemakers. (Intriguing how the word ‘violence’ is so often bandied about in connection to the protests, when the only significant violence against people is perpetrated by armed hooligans (sorry, police) – violence against property is hardly on the same level, and, anyway, might be said to reveal the latent violence hidden behind the smooth glass facades and official spin-talk (lies) of the power structure.) In coverage of both occasions, news coverage has crystallised around violence against, or involving, a specific object : the fire extinguisher thrown from the Millbank roof, and the police van which was abandoned inside the kettle and subsequently trashed. Not sure what to make of this – I don’t think most people are that devoted to vans, that bothered if they get trashed – so why the building up of such spluttering outrage? And why would anyone care? Surely no one really takes seriously the idea that, unless the kettle had been established, there would have been a horde of rampant teenagers running through the centre of London like the zombies in ‘28 Weeks Later’, trashing everything in their wake, a danger to the public and to private property…And surely most people would be more worried about their 15-year old son or daughter being forcibly detained for hours on end by armed and volatile police than by the thought that their offspring might smash a window?

The fact that so many of the protestors were young (mid-teens), does provide an opportunity for those in authority, and their media flunkies, to dismiss the protests as youthful idiocy, the violent action of confused teenagers (who are always angry at mum and dad, even though they know what’s best for them). (The Daily Mail, bizarrely, provides a sexist angle on the whole thing, as does The Telegraph.) But, at the same time, their youth, and the fact they many of them were obviously not experienced leftist organisers, is very exciting – it indicates the potential radicalisation of an entire generation who might otherwise have ignored, or swallowed, the coalition government’s heinous policies.

Finally, to focus solely on the events in London would be to distort the overall picture; whereas the NUS march of November 10th saw students from around the country descend on the capital, yesterday’s walkout, organised mainly by word of mouth and through the new social media (facebook, twitter, etc), saw events happening all over the country – clashes with police in Brighton and Bristol, occupations at many, many universities, peaceful marches elsewhere. Another walkout is planned for next week (November 30th), and hopefully the youthful exuberance and belief of the students can kick some life into the trade unions as well; while these actions may not immediately cause the government to crumble, they will be rattled, and, most importantly, their may be a gradual change in the general mindset, an alternative to the ‘there is no alternative’ fatalism that has been so prevalent recently – or, as Badiou argues in ‘The Communist Hypothesis’ the idea of an alternative.

“As in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground.”

And perhaps something more as well...

More details on the protests:
A further post from Richard Seymour
Rolling updates from Libcom
The Guardian's Live Feed
Laurie Penny
Openned H.E. Protests Posting Page

Spitting Words and Rocks: The London Education Protests, 10.11.10

Oh hello, there was a march through the centre of London yesterday, it went past the House of Parliament and along by the river. It was organised by the NUS and UCU and was protesting education cuts and said things like: “NO to scrapping the EMA / NO to the privatisation of Arts, Humanities and Social Science teaching / NO to cutting ESOL provision / NO to higher fees / NO to fees in FE for ‘adult learning’ / NO to soaring levels of debt / And YES to fairness, equity, and a properly funded state education system.” And this march was supposed to go along its route and then there would be a rally at the end and we would watch some videos and speeches projected on a big screen and then everyone would go home or to the ‘afterparty’ at LSE; and there would be around 15,000 people there, in the middle of the week, in the early afternoon. But then there were 50,000 people from Wales and Scotland and England and some 5,000 of them went to the nearby Millbank Tower and caused damage to private property, which is a mortal sin, and they were not orderly and glass was smashed and there were figures on the roof with an anarchist flag and with fists and they stood out against the blue sky.

So, the media coverage of the demo was predictable, given the way that any of the past few years’ protests and riots in Greece or France have been routinely denounced as dangerous, irresponsible, ‘against common sense’ – the work of thugs, hooligans, ‘yobbos’. In article after article we see the 5,000 protestors who gathered and merged and jostled in the courtyard of 30 Millbank, Conservative Party HQ, similarly denounced as a small ‘extremist’ element (“a minority of idiots” as the NUS president described them). These ‘evil, or at best misguided’ [by whom?!] idiot-thugs (never mind the fact that a number of people there looked delicate and fragile and might be trounced by football hooligans) ‘damage the cause’; these thugs make all reasonable people hate them because they smash a few windows and enter the hallowed sanctum of those who are pushing the low of competition and profit and the law of the market down our throats and telling us to like it and stop choking; because they threw a few eggs and rocks and because there were flares and a small fire was lit with small and delicate wisps of charred paper floating over the crowd and down on them like some sort of confetti; because someone brought out a ghetto-blaster and the crowd started nodding their heads to muffled Drum ‘N Bass and suddenly everything felt like a cross between a rave a riot and a soundtracked piece of film or theatre (a surreal revealing of the real unreality of life under the present system); because the atmosphere was that of a carnival or a party, albeit one driven by frustration and anger – and yet the overall feeling was one of exhilaration – as someone said to me afterwards, ‘I realized when I was standing in that crowd that this was the happiest I’d felt for a long tine’; because this was a piece of fucking street theatre, a performance, an action, a happening; because this was where the avant-garde and performance art met and merged with ‘popular’ culture and the mass euphoria of the crowd in a club or a music festival or a football match or a demo; and where the impulse to destruction stemmed from the same spirit as the impulse to creation and enabled it and fostered it and fuelled it; because this is where theory becomes, became feeling. ‘My education is a fist.’

The point of an action like this is that it cannot be restricted, cannot be shepherded and moved on by the march stewards or the cops, cannot be made to move on rather than sitting down in front of the Houses of Parliament, cannot be reduced to the end-point of a big-screen and speeches made on a bus parked in front of Tate Britain and videos like movie trailers with pounding orchestral music and bogey-man Nick Clegg so that the march becomes the multiplex; all the momentum of whistles and drums and chants and people standing on the roofs of bus-stops and builders on scaffolding being cheered by crowds of students and grinning back could not be made simply to dissipate and disappear, to tail and trail off back down the road into ‘normality’; that we – you – want something more and cannot suppress that longing any longer.

The chants and songs, the rhyming couplets and swearwords and plosive voice explosions that you hear on marches such as this respond to the sloganeering and slick phraseology of advertising/ political-spin-culture, where a catchphrase cons us into acceptance and lulls our thinking minds to sleep; “Ready for Change" comes up against “Tory scum, Here We Come”. We might even say that this is poetry, poetry as antagonism and response and counter-thrust. It may not be ‘good poetry’, the slogans might even ‘embarrass’ you or seem trite and child-like. Yet they are there; this is change we can believe in, or at least it is a glimpse of the change that might happen were the momentum of yesterday afternoon to continue, to build up, to be followed up.

“When we mourn violence done against buildings more than violence done against people, we have totally internalised capitalist rationality. Perhaps attacking buildings is the only way to reassert the importance of being human.”(The Third Estate)

"The argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in modern politics. There is something that Governments care for far more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy." (Emmeline Pankhurst)

“He was in the street, not a professional context but an open framework, a social and public space where all types of different people pass by, and there he was, taking risks without being afraid of looking utterly ridiculous! It reminds me of something that happened during the recent riots in Athens, where journalists came across a gang attacking places that represented neoliberalism to make noise, using breaking glass and burglar alarms as instruments. Improvising in the city. That's so inspiring, like the Futurists, the Scratch Orchestra and Black Block joining forces in an extreme form of sonic dérive! Imagine using police sirens as your instrument! Imagine what a beautiful drone twenty of them would make! The urban space offers so many possibilities for noise production, let's use the city as our venue – we'll always have an audience!”(Mattin)

"Love is not the unswerving bias of police dogs; it has to be made from scratch at the first indication of its possibility.”

“The wall of glass smashed in, looks like what Wordsworth saw; in the flint windbreaker, lying on the empty floor; to be a shard of broken glass, shining like life; psychosis as the mirror of your dreams, or justice.”(Jow Lindsay)

Nachtstück

Eva-Maria Houben – Nachtstück (2007)
performed by Dominic Lash – contrabass. 13th June 2010.

The first in a proposed series dedicated to the music of the Wandelweiser group, this was intriguingly set up as Dom Lash performing a ‘gig’ in his house: chamber music in the original sense of that term. So no stuffed-shirt concert-hall aesthetics here, as the cold summer air (yes, this is Britain) blows in from the garden and a tap drips, somewhere off to ‘stage left’.

One piece on the programme – an hour-long Eva-Maria Houben composition for solo bass which, while not exclusively quiet, does feature frequent silences, the most delicate of high pitched-harmonics, and an extremely ‘stripped-down’ range of material. The piece is not exclusively about the creation of sound (making a noise); rather, that aspect exists alongside the equally important element of listening, hearing. As Houben puts it, Nachtstück “allows hearing to take place.”

That phrase is from her short programme note for the piece, in which she also describes “music happen[ing] all by itself, seemingly uncomposed – like the sound of the Aeolian harp, its strings set in motion by a passing wind.” Of course, one immediately feels like quibbling that this is a composition; furthermore, the problem with Aeolian harps (as evidenced by the selection on the obscure LP ‘Songs of the Wind Harp’) is that there is no discrimination between sounds, no decision-making process, no shaping of material – in other words, no sense of human agency – and it is human agency which, ultimately, does drive Houben’s piece, which makes it an involving and rewarding experience, a piece of human interaction. So is the Aeolian Harp analogy simply a ‘poetic’ image – something which sounds nice written as a programme note but doesn’t mean too much when you ponder what it means? Well, no, I would argue that there is something important in the choice of simile, perhaps as a gesture towards a certain looseness, by means of contrast with the stereotype of the controlling composer who is not willing, as Houben is, to give the performer, the audience, or the sounds themselves, a certain freedom. (Note that this looseness, this freedom is by no means absolute, for control and limitation are vital factors here.) In addition, the notion of ‘uncomposition’ is perhaps meant to hint at the extreme simplicity of the material (the hour long piece almost exclusively uses natural harmonics and one particular droning string, punctuated by long silences; this is even more ‘minimal’ in terms of melodic material than late Feldman), which lends it a certain ‘anonymous’ quality (on which more below). At the same time, the degree of virtuosity required is very great – but this is virtuosity not for its own sake, for display, for showing off, but in the service of a radically limited and focussed selection of material that, while it may inspire admiration for the performer’s abilities, does not take this as a raison d’etre, does not make it the primary element.

While it might be going too far to speak of ‘melody’ as such, the piece does have a melodic quality, with its repeated, returning progression of notes; and the return of the low drone after a passage of exquisitely delicate, high-pitched harmonics, resounds (almost) like a grandly returning main theme at the climax of a symphony. One could see this as essentially Webernian – the compression of extreme drama, extreme event, into tiny spaces. But, in fact, the opposite is true of this piece: ‘Nachtstück’ actually concerns the expansion of extremely limited material into a large space, a large time span. Or maybe it’s about the eradication of time, about achieving a state akin to the ecstatic, a-temporal moment aimed at in meditation. By this I don’t mean to imply that the music is simply some piece of hip, arty Zen (or even a genuinely Buddhist experience, which is perhaps something aspired to in the music of Eliane Radigue). It does not aspire to levitate from the body, to abandon the earthly delusions of maya for disembodied bliss; rather, it makes one profoundly aware of one’s surroundings and of one’s body – the sound of one’s own stomach gurgling, even the sound of one’s own breath. (This is true of ‘reductionist’ music in general, but I don’t think that makes it any less relevant to this particular performance). It’s a kind of framing of environment, I guess – the music transforms the ‘background sounds’, and these sounds transform the music; something is shared between performer and composer, performer and audience, audience and performer, environment and music, music and environment, the connections, the loops, the interlinking chains, forming a kind of exquisite slow dance.

As such language indicates, this music is far from ‘sterile’ or ‘cerebral’; on the contrary, it tempts one to utopian generalisation. Because a fair portion of the piece is devoted to ‘silences’ (when the performer is not making any sound), the audience must assume an ‘active’ role (audience participation without the awkward sense of obligation it can sometimes assume in a theatrical context). They must collaborate with the composer and performer in ‘creating’, or shaping the silences, through bringing a certain quality of attention to them (although that itself is coloured by the notes that have sounded before). In the end though, these things are out of the audience’s hands as much as they are out of the composer’s or performer’s; in this performance, we had a duet for buzzing flies, birdcalls, a jet engine meshing with a particular droning bass frequency, a brief snatch of ‘O Sole Mio’ via an ice-cream van, occasional voices and shouts from distant gardens, and, towards the end of the piece, a non-metric rhythm provided by a summer rain shower (shades of Taku Sugimoto’s ‘Live in Australia’ – can a natural occurrence be said to ‘refer’ to a previous work of art?). One could even go so far as to say that both ‘composer’ and ‘performer’ are virtually eradicated – the composer because they are concentrating on sounds so ‘simple’ that they might be said to resonate with the anonymous, primal resonance of folk music: sounds that, because they belongs to no one author, belong to everyone, as their shared possession. (I’m not so much thinking here of ‘folk tunes’ as such, but of that most crucial element of folk music, the drone; ‘Nachtstück’ reminded me, in terms of a certain limitation of sonority, extremely powerful in its impact, of the Khazakstany one-stringed viol, the kobyz.) As for the performer, their ‘eradication’ comes about because the material cannot be ‘emotionally interpreted’ as most of the ‘great works’ of classical music can; rather, it must be played with an almost overwhelming focus on accuracy (or as much accuracy as is possible). In addition, neither the performer nor the composer can control the silences (nor, for that matter, can the audience, but they can choose to shape the silences by the kind of attention they pay to them, as discussed above). This makes it sound as if I’m saying that the audience shape the music more than either the composer or the performer, which is simply not true. But there is a kind of sharing here which is more common, perhaps, to improvised music: an interpretation of post-Cageian attitudes to ‘silence’ which I will not taint through the utopian generalisations I threatened above. So perhaps now would be a good point to stop writing – and to congratulate Dominic Lash on hosting, and giving, this very fine performance. Future instalments in the series are eagerly awaited…

AAAARG!!!! (DOT ORG)

It seems that A.AAAARG.ORG has finally bitten the dust: the site’s main page now bears the legend, ‘A.AAAARG.ORG DOES NOT EXIST’, a delightful comment on the transient and virtual nature of an ‘organisation’ that was always virtual, never ‘actual’, but which offers us some intriguing glimpses, even, one might say, utopian possibilities, for the future of study and intellectual exchange. Given this, I thought that now might be an appropriate to set out some of my thoughts on the AAAARG phenomenon (yes, something can be a ‘phenomenon’ even if it isn’t all over myspace, Facebook, Twitter, the Guardian, and the Huffington Post) and what it might mean.

Some time last summer, at the internet point in a small Spanish albergue on the Camino de Santiago, I came across a link to a resource with an astounding amount of book-length, PDF-format academic material, from the likes of Derrida, Barthes, Adorno, Deleuze and Zizek, apparently available for free download. I'd just graduated from university, and had thus lost my access to university library facilities and to websites, such as JSTOR, which contain back-issues of journals and academic e-books. Furthermore, my graduation had necessitated a move from Cambridge back to Swindon, where the availability of academic books (particularly in the realms of literary and critical theory, aesthetics, and 'avant-garde' music) leaves something to be desired. Thus, though I didn’t realize it fully until I got back home from Spain, AAAARG.ORG (later updated to A.AAAARG.ORG.), was to become a particularly useful resource. Having subscribed to the website’s mailing list, I found a daily e-mail popping into my inbox, containing a list of at least twenty uploaded books per day, on topics as diverse as anarchist and Marxist thought, aesthetics, literary theory, continental philosophy, geography, feminism, poetry, orientalism: you name it, it was there. My hard drive was soon filling up with neatly-compressed PDFs of all kinds, most of which I still have not read.

The problem with this sort of thing is that such this vast availability of information, easily clickable and downloadable, means that a lifetime of thought becomes translated into a few megabytes of hard disk space. I’m not saying that such information should become the privilege of an elite, moneyed few – those with the inclination and the cash to splash out fifteen pounds on a two-hundred page slab of Derridean wisdom – but the worry is that it becomes just another bit of data, just another part of the spectacle, just another collection of dots on a screen to which we pay only the vaguest attention. It’s the same with music downloads: there’s no doubt that fans of ‘left-field’ music (particularly those who missed out on original releases the first time round, because they hadn’t yet been born!) have received something akin to an education through file-sharing blogs like Inconstant Sol, Church Number Nine, and all the others (see my article in the second issue of ‘eartrip’). We owe much to this massive up-surge in the availability of MP3 versions of long out-of-print LPs containing free jazz, free improvisation, musique concrete, Indian classical music, Afrobeat, and all other kinds of cross- and sub-generic offerings. And yet, I find myself – and I know I’m not alone in this – with piles of CDs, each containing about twenty hours’ worth of music – CDs of material I’ve downloaded and burned myself, CDs I’ve been given by friends – that, in all likelihood, I may not listen to for months or even years; and, if I do listen to them, I may not listen to them with the full and careful attention they deserve, and which might be accorded to them if they sat in front of me as separate and unique objects, gate-fold LPs or jewel-case CDs, rather than megabytes on a computer screen. The tendency is to see something that looks interesting, and to download, because it’s free – and then to forget about it, to put it on the back-burner, to download something else, and then something else, and something else again…

There’s a further problem with the academic book file-sharing: most of these books are still in print, unlike the LPs. In the end, though, I don’t find this too hard a claim to react to: few of us have the money to splash out on these books; most of us rely on borrowing other people’s copies, using university libraries, and the like. And I’m intrigued and encouraged by the anti-copyright rhetoric of free improviser/theorist Mattin and others, and by the idea of some new kind of digital university, a virtual space where the exchange of ideas is free and open, where information is shared for its own sake, rather than traded and bartered for and guarded with the jealousness with which ‘property’ is guarded – a radical system, anarchy in the best sense, with exciting political implications. Even if such a system doesn’t exist in the ‘real world’, sites like A.AAAARG, just like musical free improvisations, offer a glimpse of what such utopias might be like, provide templates which might be applied to the worlds of politics and social organization on a much larger scale. This becomes all the more pertinent as I’ve become increasingly jaded by the monetization and corruption inherent in the structures of universities as they exist, in the main, today; by the way that people with ‘good intentions’ and exciting minds are forced into systems in which they are forced to fight for their right to think, provoke, challenge, inquire, forced to tick boxes and assess the financial and economic benefits their work will bring. The ‘virtual university’ offers an alternative where money and physical space is not an issue, a truly global collaborative network, where ideas are shared for their own importance, and not for their financial benefit.

Having said all this, I’m afraid I will have to deflate this rousing conclusion by admitting that it is far easier on the eyes to read a book made of paper and ink, rather than one made of pixels and brightly-glowing lights. Anyway, further reading at the following links:

Paris Ionescu on aaaarg and agonism (http://blog.selfportrait.net/2010/05/29/some-thoughts-on-aaaarg-and-agonism/)

Newsflash on the aaaarg closure (http://mitochondrialvertigo.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/macmillan-and-mark-taylor-take-down-aaaarg-org/)

Discussion with AAAARG architect Sean Dockray (http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2010/01/05/small-is-beautiful-a-discussion-with-aaaarg-architect-sean-dockray/) "I don’t think it’s sustainable, but file sharing is resilient. That part is sustainable if what’s meant is something that will weather bad economies, legal threats, changes in technology, etc. AAAARG probably won’t. But I don’t think it matters; it’s not trying to be the new library. That said, I don’t think it will disappear, I don’t think anything ever does. The word promiscuity for the digital object I think is a really good one."

Very comprehensive overview/history of online text-sharing sites (http://openreflections.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/scanners-collectors-and-aggregators-on-the-%E2%80%98underground-movement%E2%80%99-of-pirated-theory-text-sharing/). “As mentioned before, the harm to producers (scholars) and their publishers (in Humanities and Social Sciences mainly Not-For-Profit University Presses) is less clear. First of all, their main customers are libraries (compare this to the software business model: free for the consumer, companies pay), who are still buying the legal content and mostly follow the policy of buying either print or both print and ebook, so there are no lost sales there for the publishers. Next to that it is not certain that the piracy is harming sales. Unlike in literary publishing, the authors (academics) are already paid and do not loose money (very little maybe in royalties) from the online availability.. [….] Still, it is not only the lack of fear of possible retaliations that is feeding the upsurge of text sharing communities. There is a strong ideological commitment to the inherent good of these developments, and a moral and political strive towards institutional and societal change when it comes to knowledge production and dissemination.”

Brief article on piracy (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/nov/24/file-sharing-free-piracy) "It is not only because there can be potentially infinite owners of property that the internet redefines our notion of it. It is also that people who participate in the exchange of immaterial works do not treat them as property. When they exchange music, books or movies, they are not merely transferring ownership from themselves to others; they simply do not recognise themselves as owners in the first place."

Mattin’s essay on Free Improvisation and the Anti-Copyright ethos (http://www.mattin.org/essays/Mattin-ANTI-COPYRIGHT.html) "Notions of intellectual property are going to be the issue of the future, and if we do not find ways of challenging the structures that are being developed we are going to be pretty fucked."

aaaarg itself (http://a.aaaarg.org/)