Statement

Bare Share
we were uncool before uncool was cool

Abstract
This text speaks about the evolution of romanian digital society. It presents the DC++ phenomenon in Romania arguing that while the administration's efforts to meet EU standards stumbled in social evolutionism, the combination of technological development and illiteracy in permission culture "beamed up" the romanian internet generation to face the very issues of contemporary virtual social space - e.g. producing remix culture or playing gift economies. This is framed - specific to the romanian context - by a romantic manner in tackling self-representation or telling private from public space - as illustrated by the accompanying collection of cultural artefacts collected from public DC++ hubs.

Introduction
According to Wikipedia, file sharing is "the practice of making files available for other users to download over the Internet and smaller networks". DC++ is a file sharing software, like Kazaa, Gnutella, or the now iconic Napster. The popularity of peer to peer file sharing has always been huge: Napster registered 10 million users in its first 6 months of activity with 200.000 new users in one day, and at its peak 60 million users were sharing 2 million songs. Napster was brought down by copyright lawsuits, while "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales" - a study conducted by Oberholzer and Strumpf in 2004 proved file sharing has statistically zero effect on record sales. Today over 1/3 of the global internet traffic is consumed by peer to peer connections. It is a significant world phenomenon, and media expert Marco Montemagno, author of the P2P Manifesto states it is not only the thing to come: peer to peer networking is unstoppable.

Permission vs. remix culture
P2P networking became the achilles tendon of permission culture - a society in which copyright restrictions are pervasive and enforced to the extent that any use of copyrighted works need to be explicitly leased. The key issue is the changing global paradigm of producing culture. As McLuhan observed, in the coming age individuals turn from consumers to producers of culture. At the larger scale, media culture shifts from mass consumption to mass production and examples like Flick, YouTube and Wikipedia illustrate the phenomenon plenty. Mass media culture is ephemeral, and the continuity of ephemeral cultural artefacts is essential to ensure continuity of culture - our non-genetic way to adapt to the environment. The lumpy administration of the system in which copyright holders can require payment for each use of a work cannot keep up with todays accelerated production and consumption cycles. The solution is a culture permissive by default of efforts to improve upon, change, integrate, or otherwise remix the work of copyright holders - the currently used term being remix or read/write culture. Permission culture keeps kicking back and YouTube has already been forced by copyright owners to delete ripped material from its servers. But this can only happen because YouTube is built on a client-server model. Had it been peer to peer, with no central location of any file and with parallel downloading of each file from hundreds of users, there would be no way to ask for the deletion of any cultural artefact. Peer to peer YouTubes will mark the transition to the new era called the post-copyright apocalypse.

Netnography
P2P programs like DC++ are the forefathers of web 2.0 in creating social networking - creating places to see and be seen by peers. With the dynamic development of communities based on sharing common knowledge of culture, looking for trends and patterns, meanings and symbolism becomes the work of a nethnographer - an emerging metier doing qualitative, interprettive research of computer mediated communications. With group members identity ranging from verinymity to anonymity the unit of analysis becomes behavior or the social act, rather than the individual person. The methods of ethnography - means of identifying significant categories of human experience are still applicable though: interviews, observation, and documents producing quotations, descriptions and excerpts are transferrable to the virtual environment.

Neighborhood networks as ISP's
File sharing is rooted in the so-called neighborhood networks - developed in the late nineties in Romania's biggest cities, most notably in university centers like Bucharest, Cluj, Iasi and Timisoara. In 2000 Romania's internet penetration was 4% compared to Germany's 28% and people were looking for an alternative to expensive and low-bandwidth dial-up. Help came from students who already built small dormitory networks (usually leeching the university backbone) and with their expertise transferred to other students living in the residential area blocks of flats, small 5-10 computer networks were created sharing a single internet connection. These initiatives grew very fast from tens to hundreds then thousands of users. Hunks of UTP then optical cable appeared overnight on lampposts, and ISP executives anxious about their loss of profit started complaining about the "second rewiring" of the country. In 2004 Varujan Pambuccian, then president of the Commission for IT and Communication in the Parliament declared that neighborhood networks were the only spontaneous economic phenomenon in Romania. The National Authority for Communications and IT reacted and set up a legal framework for turning neighborhood networks into liable legal entities. Neighborhood networks became businesses and soon associated setting up Interlan in late 2004. By then firms like C-Zone grew to over 10.000 users and over 1.000.000 euro invested. Today in Romania there are over 750 neighborhood networks with over 1.6 million users. Big ISP providers started buying off the operators to eliminate competition. Currently a huge 28% of internet connections are done through neighborhood networks in Romania.

File sharing on neighborhood networks
Neighborhood network members are generally wired with 100 Mbps UTP lines allowing a transfer between nodes of up to 12 MB/s. This means a shared 700 MB mpeg movie transfers in one minute from one user to another, a 4.7 GB DVD image in 7 minutes. Internet bandwidth for a user rarely exceeds 512 Mbps thus it is far more efficient to download music, films, software and books from one another then from the net (e.g. torrents). Everybody understood this, so everybody has used DC++ from the beginning, while internet was only used for mailing and googling. The bear share of traffic was done through the intranet. The two proto-contracts of the early days speak for this: "Network Access" and "Network Access with internet".

Operation Gramophone
Software piracy was 95% in 2000 and it decreased with less then 5% each year to 75% in 2006, when Romania received an "yellow flag" from EU regarding software piracy and copyright issues. "Piracy helped the young generation discover computers. It set off the development of the IT industry in Romania," - Romania's President Basescu said during a news conference with Bill Gates. Gates made no comment. But police have long considered neighborhood networks a medium where illegalities thrive. Operation Gramophone in June 2006 struck tens of DC++ users at home in a cleansing set of actions. Computers were confiscated by ski-masked SWAT-teams in 4 counties of the 41. Civil society retaliated swiftly on the immature legal grounds of Operation Gramophone and the Anti-Gramophone disclaimer was conceived. The text invoking quotes from Romania's constitution to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights regarding private space is hung as a mantra at the entry of many neighborhood network users today, meant to chase the law away.

Identity and Value
Users tell hubs by the main chat and the shared content. Big hubs are less moderated and content is more homogenous while smaller hub chats are more closely watched and content is targeted. The social cohesion of a DC++ hub is inversely proportional with its size, smaller DC++ hub members still organize face-to-face meetings. At a hub meeting in 2004 Ultranet hub moderator Sanyi took pride in having "the most civilized chat" and having "a much bigger upload then download traffic" - meaning that more people were taking files from them then they are taking from others - a praise to the quality of content shared on the hub. Romanian DC++ networks rarely tolerate leechers. A minimum share of 1-20 GB share is generally required to gain access to what others offer. Big minimum share signals a hub proud of its content and member quality.

What is shared
When setting up their first share, DCnauts usually throw in whatever they got on their computers. This is usually music, films, kits and games - an unstable collection, largely governed by fashion trends as the average age of DC users is 25. But to raise to the bar of for self-representation sakes people often share their private folders. Searching for "My Documents" in the top 30 hubs constantly produces more than 1000 hits. Photos, letters, home videos complete the palette of shared items. As users generally do not realize the extent their data can be used or abused, DC++ shares reside at the vulnerable edge between private and public space. Downloaded data is spreading uncontrollably, creating inter-referential representations and copies of each other. Backtrace to the original instance or meaning is technically impossible. The cultural artefacts become simulacra with no real original, stable or objective source for communication and meaning. With inter-subjective and not objective knowledge dominating the discourse DC++ networks comply to the postmodern condition.

Meaning of sharing
"In folk tales," as Hyde observes, "the person who tries to hold onto a gift usually dies". Neighborhood networks are providers of endemic culture and the act of sharing is the prototypical contract of participating to this culture. Sharing while not expecting immediate gratification make neighborhood networks complex gift economies - where the community becomes an entity, the real gifting parther - playing the role of the donor and recipient in the same time. This ideology of exchange - regardless of legal issues or moral concerns - builds a subculture of consumption that is maintained through giving. Gifting becomes a tool for the collapse of the permission culture based capitalist market hegemony while serving as an alternative consumption activity at the electronic frontier. The collection set up for Culturscapes gives an insight on the romanian way of giving.