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The void created by the death of God had, for Nietzsche, left human being still confronted by the incredible horror of life, by a profound suffering, just as it had his Greek and Christian ancestors. In Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future Nietzsche says:

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness -- was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

I've just stumbled into the Open Humanities Press -- a collection of open access journals in the humanities. What a wonderful idea in contrast to the Griffith Review being hidden behind a subscription wall despite the public subsidy from the Australia Council.

As the folks at Cosmos and History say:

Open-access journals offer free access to articles and broaden the readership of publications beyond the restrictions of traditional commercial publishing. In any 12 month period Cosmos and History has around 900,000 ‘hits’, this equates to around 140,000 ‘unique visits’. However, what really matters is article downloads; currently with five issues published we are getting around 150 article downloads a day, with some individual articles being downloaded as often as 10 times a day.

Opponents of the open access journals assert that the pay-for-access model is necessary to ensure that the publisher is adequately compensated for their work. Scholarly journal publishers that support pay-for-access claim that the "gatekeeper" role they play, maintaining a scholarly reputation, arranging for peer review, and editing and indexing articles, require economic resources that are not supplied under an open access model.

Well the digital age changes a lot of that, and so we have something like Philosophy Ethics and Humanities in Medicine.

This is a classic example of old industrial technology:

Bernd and Hilla Becher, Styrofoam plant near Cologne, Germany, 1997

The new technology is the internet and BitTorrent files---that gives us the capacity to “hyperdistribute” --- to send a single copy of a programme to millions of people around the world efficiently and instantaneously. In his post Unevenly Distributed: Production Models for the 21st Century on the the human network. Mark Pesce describes the far reaching implications of this technology. Referring to YouTube he says:

When the barriers to media distribution collapsed in the post-Napster era, the exhibitors and broadcasters lost control of distribution. What no one had expected was that the professional producers would lose control of production. The difference between an amateur and a professional – in the media industries – has always centered on the point that the professional sells their work into distribution, while the amateur uses wits and will to self-distribute. Now that self-distribution is more effective than professional distribution, how do we distinguish between the professional and the amateur? This twenty year-old doesn’t know, and doesn’t care.
There is no conceivable way that the current systems of film and television production and distribution can survive in this environment.

As is well known analytic philosophy's narrative holds that it began in a reaction against "Hegelian thought," specifically, the neo-Hegelianism of late 19th century Britain. Russell and Moore overthrew the doctrines of internal relations, of the falsehood of the partial and the truth only of the whole, and of the fundamentally spiritual nature of the world. Most important, they brought into philosophy the new logic that had revolutionized a discipline that hadn't changed significantly since Aristotle invented it.

As we know Russell particularly promulgated a 'shadow Hegel,' a distorted, even mythical image that justified his philosophical patricide, and he sold it effectively for the rest of his life. After the Cambridge Two slew the Hegelian father and liberated philosophy from his oppressive regime, Hegel and Absolute Idealism became taboo, mentionable only with disgust, scorn, and ritualistic excoriation.

The 'shadow Hegel', of course, is the British Hegelians, whose alleged idealistic excesses gave rise to ‘analytic philosophy. The disgust, scorn and contempt then ignored the way that Continental European philosophy over the last two centuries has been so many different responses to Hegel.

The pastoral

Mark Bahnisch at Larvatus Prodeo has been trying to facilitate a broader conversation in the blogosphere about creative Australia around the 2020 Summit. He supports a call for fundamental rethinking of the purposes and aims of arts and cultural policy argued for by Ben Eltham at the Centre for Policy Development. If we are faced with an entrenched bias in funding to major performing arts companies, then the 2020 Summit's focus was on traditional arts funding.

Though there is a need to value the arts and to argue for a more sustainable future for the sector, this came at the expense of ideas development in areas such as architecture and built environment (a key link to the sustainability agenda), design (a key link between creative and other industries, from manufacturing to services) and the emerging area of digital content and the creative economy. Stuart Cunningham said in New Matilda that:

I was intrigued that when mention was made of "digital content", it was mostly assumed that this meant infrastructure or digitising the content of cultural institutions. These are both crucial aspects of the digital agenda, but the key point is that there is a whole new industry sector emerging out of the convergence of communications, culture and social innovation. By 2020, Australia should be participating strongly in a rapidly expanding digital economy..... And understanding the "creative economy" means grasping the fact that there are more workers in creative occupations outside the creative industries than inside them. Creative skills are needed right across the economy. Digital content creation is set to become the general purpose technology of the 21st century.

the 2020 Summit pretty much failed to explore the implications of creativity in the post Napster digital world of the internet; a world of BitTorrent, high speed broadband, peer-to peer sharing, Flickr, MP3 players and YouTube. The file-sharing---60% of all traffic on the Internet is composed of BitTorrent transfers--- has happened outside of the economic systems of distribution established by the recording , television and film industry. So what does this mean for Creative Australia?

I'm off to New Zealand for 2 weeks holiday. You can follow the progress on junk for code. In the meantime we have David Harvey on desire and memory:

My favourite line from Balzac is “hope is a memory that desires” and that was how I wrote Spaces of Hope, around that idea. Everybody has a memory, but memory can become nostalgia when it’s left on its own; nostalgia is not hope. Hope is memory that’s mobilized around desire. So the question is what do we desire and how do we want to desire it? For me, that is the crucial aspect of everything we do. So if I focus on Balzac, to whom I return again and again, I might conclude, “wow, yeah, that’s what’s it about, I desire things, but I can not do this absent of the memory.” As Walter Benjamin says about memory, “memory is not history, its something that flashes up, in moments of danger,” it somehow or other animates things.

In his post Mob Rules (The Law of Fives ) Charles Pesce draws an interesting picture of a network by describing how a Meraki Mini works. This was a closing keynote at the Web Directions South 2007 conference that was on in Sydney in 2007. Pesce says:

Four months ago, a small startup in Silicon Valley named Meraki (Greek for “doing it with love”) for unveiled a cute little device, a wireless router that they simply named the Mini. Inside it has a RISC CPU running a custom version of LINUX which handles all of the routing tasks. That’s where it gets interesting. You see, Meraki have pioneered a new technology known as “wireless mesh networking”. You can power up a Mini in anywhere you like, and if there’s another Mini within distance – and these devices can reach nearly half a kilometer, outdoors – it will connect to it, share routing information, and route packets from one to another – all without any need to configure anything at all. Add another, and another, and another, and all of a sudden you’ve created a very wide area WiFi network. Only one of the Minis needs to be connected to the Internet as a gateway; the others will find it and route traffic through it. The Minis are small – and they’re also cheap. For just $49 dollars US, you can order one complete with an Australian wall wart. That’s cheaper than most access points out there, and because of the mesh networking, it does a whole lot more.

And thus a self-organizing network is formed outside the control of the telcos; a network in a era when the mob rules. So the emphasis is on the how the mob uses the networks , and how networks change because of the mob.