Lecture: Novelty against sovereignty

The case of DIY drug extraction

By way of a comparison between two subcultures/communities that both assert their autonomy vis-à-vis the State through a 'flight into the future', hackers and psychonauts, the former innovating around intellectual property law, the latter around controlled substance acts, a reflection is made on the limitations of instituted, sovereign power. The entire face of the earth having been mapped out and divided up between instituted powers, the last remaining no-mans-land is the ever-evasive near future. Providing a hideout for occasional "social bandits", the legal greyzone is concurrently being turned into an incubator for corporate innovation, placed right at the centre of the innovation driven, high-tech economy, and much lauded by EU policy makers. In management discourse, the intimate relation between innovation and illegality is suggested by the much talk about "Shenzhen innovation". Here "Shenzen" does not designate just an industrial region in China, but the historical state of being outside-the-law, constitutive of its innovativeness. As filesharing and hacking provides numerous examples of, the "open" innovation model is fine-tuned as a model for procuring innovation from users, out of which some may even be hostile to the corporations, and find themselves on the "wrong" side of law. Their illegal status does not gainsay that corporations can make a profit from them, on the contrary, illegality lays down the base-line for negotiating the labour conditions of pirates. Labouring in the legal grey zone, subject to the punitive side of law but not to its protective, consumer-regulative clauses, hackers and psychonauts are pioneering new forms of citizenship in the Schumpeterian-Shenzen innovation state.

Info

Day: 2014-11-02
Start time: 16:15
Duration: 00:45
Room: C444
Track: Peer Production
Language: en

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