(photo: Ned Rossiter)
I have just uploaded an exchange with Christoph Spehr, the German ‘free cooperation’ theorist, on creative labour and the hybrid work of cooperation. This online dialogue grew out of the work that Trebor Scholz and I did on the documentation of the Free Cooperation project. A book is scheduled to come out with Autonomedia late 2006 in which a key text on the art of (online) collaboration was written by Christoph Spehr. The following dialogue started as a series of comments by Christoph Spehr on the introduction to the Free Cooperation anthology that Trebor Scholz and I wrote in January 2006. An earlier online interview between Christoph Spehr and me took place in June 2003 and can be found here. In this conversation we try to jump over our shadows and discuss precarious work, the gift economy concept and the relation between online and offline work. What does it mean to ‘out-cooperate’ the Empire in the sense of out-playing, out-performing the System? Is it aimed at creating ‘surplus-virtuosity’, drawing from a rich and diverse pool of lived experiences? Out-cooperating strategies should be read as the network equivalent of the outsourcing logic and relates back to questions of scalability, mass-adoption of ‘social networking’ practices admidst a looming crisis how to monetarize cultural artifacts (and earn a decent income).