The presumed dangers of TTIP, the trade agreement currently under negotiation between the EU and the USA, have taken on a new urgency following the documents released by Greenpeace in their TTIP Leaks. For the first time, the public has extensive insight into the mechanisms of market access and liberalization that are being discussed in the trade talks. In this short article originally written for iRights in late 2015, I discuss my impression that there have been very few critics of TTIP coming from digital art, and how this is puzzling since it seems as if the area of digital culture is highly implicated in TTIP, given its proximity to questions of communications infrastructure, autonomy, and cultural diversity. This has led me to assume that actors of digital art have what one in German calls a Berührungsangst, that is, a kind of fearful respect towards critically engaging with this topic. One of the reasons for this could simply be that the digital art and activism scene on the surface shares a similar set of ideals and rhetorics as those being touted by the politicians promoting TTIP: promoting access, freedom of speech, and innovation. My argument is that we need to be wary of this rhetoric and invent new vocabularies that circumvent the belief in regulatory neoliberal nightmares such as TTIP.

The Regulatory Counter-Revolution

A couple of years ago the Swedish net activist and historian Rasmus Fleischer published an article on what he perceived as an ongoing counter-revolution in internet politics. In short, Fleischer described the current drive of governments and corporations to securitize, marketize, and centralize the internet, under a deceptive (re-)claiming of the ideals of freedom of speech and openness associated with critical net culture. For a panel debate at transmediale in early 2014, I invited Fleischer to address this issue together with the hacker and security expert Frank Rieger, the net artist Geraldine Juárez, and Olof Ehrencrona, a Swedish conservative politician specialized in freedom of communication and internet policy. Predictably, the discussion broke down due to the confusion of the participants using the same terms while referring to entirely different things, and in this way the event unintentionally ended up illustrating the diffusion of critical net culture happening through the said counter-revolution. Almost two years later the problem of finding an appropriate language and new formats through which to address the neoliberalization of internet culture has only increased. Through trade agreements such as TTIP, the counter-revolution has revealed itself to be foremost a regulatory one that poses considerable threats to freedom of speech, decentralized communication, free culture, and the commons, as well as independent artistic and cultural production.

“The regulation of the regulation”

The regulatory revolution manifests itself not least in the international agreements on free trade that are currently in negotiation. For Germany and Europe, one of the most notorious ones is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, aka TTIP, currently in negotiation between the EU and the USA. As part of the so called “Three Big Ts” (including TPP and TISA: Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and the Trade in Services Agreement), the overall goal is to create economic growth by way of market liberalization, including the standardization of products and services and the opening up of corporate access to various areas—including the here-relevant field of Telecommunications and Intellectual Property. Among the common traits of these deals are that they in some form include measures to increase copyright protection in ways that seem to mostly benefit corporations, and in many instances inhibit free speech and destroy net neutrality. Just take a look at the documents released by WikiLeaks in October 2015 on the Intellectual Property Rights chapter of the TPP agreement, for a scary picture of how this affects, for example, Canadian digital culture, including downright censorship of websites and incrimination of encryption practices in the interest of USA corporations. Moving to the EU-USA context, among the most well known critiques of TTIP is that it entails setting up so-called Investor State Dispute Settlement mechanisms. That basically mean that companies operating in a foreign country could through special tribunals and sue governments over what they might consider unfair trade conditions. There are a lot of different debates on the possible disastrous consequences of this on the strong public sector in the EU and it is also in this context that probable exceptions to the culture sector and audiovisual sector are being negotiated with the further motivation of protecting cultural diversity.

In an article for the March/April issue of Radical Philosophy, Maïa Pal has adequately described TTIP as “the regulation of the regulation.” This description also indicates the difficulty that especially civil society has in understanding what exactly is at stake, as such deals are negotiated behind closed curtains between the EU and the partner countries with very little concrete information. This secrecy notwithstanding, popular resistance against TTIP has seen an impressive surge, with a demonstration in Berlin on October 11, 2015 attracting 250,000 participants. The demonstration was organized through a broad coalition of unions and political and other civil society organizations, including of course also a couple of significant net political actors. The absence of explicitly digital-arts-related actors was however striking. Why has this community, which I would argue has a lot at stake in the discussion, not formulated a stronger voice in the debates around TTIP and similar deals? One of the major blind spots in the discussion around art and culture so far seems to be that distribution and even production of cultural goods in today’s digital markets is increasingly carried out by companies that do not traditionally belong to the cultural or even audiovisual sectors. How to classify Amazon or Google—who are quickly becoming major cultural players with their various media outlets like YouTube, Google Books, and Amazon Cloud and Studios. And these are only examples of the giant USA actors that will benefit from TTIP and potentially push out alternative services. The more experimental digital art and culture field in Europe has long been characterized by hybridity in both organizational form and cultural content: it does not fit easily into established cultural categories and thereby does not always easily lend itself to be included in the areas of exception discussed so far.

Overcoming the Berührungsangst

An inevitable reason for a lack of more specialized digital resistance against TTIP from the field of digital art and culture could of course also be the scarcity of information available, which in August 2015 prompted WikiLeaks to announce a crowd-sourced award campaign of 100,000 euros to potential leakers of documents from the ongoing negotiations around TTIP. The absence of information makes the issue so elusive and difficult to effectively resist or even understand in comparison to previous struggles against ACTA or SOPA, which were about specific measures on the intellectual property conditions of audiovisual and cultural production and distribution. Following the argument of the regulation of the regulation, TTIP operates more similar to a meta “TOS,” a Terms of Services agreement from which there will be no “opt-out” and that we all have to agree to in order to exchange information, goods, and services in the future.

As I hinted at in the beginning, however, the major reason for a lack of protest against TTIP from the side of digital culture could be a certain Berührungsangst due to confusion over visions and vocabularies. What is needed today is a thorough conversation on where this field is going and how alternatives to business as usual can be formulated. Artistic approaches can be extremely useful for creating new languages and imaginaries that go beyond the day-to-day politics such as TTIP while allowing us to revisit such topics with newfound rigour. At transmediale conversationpiece, we tried to take a step back from the usual format of big events and instead focus on culturing conversations in hybrid, dialogic events. We say: digital culture, we need to talk about what is really going on and redefine the terms as well as the terminologies of conversation. As an example of an already ongoing project in this direction, we invited the artists Valentina Karga and Pieterjan Grandry to develop their project Market for Immaterial Value, which is a critical reflection on the financialized and virtualized economy and the role of art within it. Mainly through the medium of conversations, both informal as well as more staged and performative ones, the artists asked whether we can “imagine a different entrepreneurial ethos, putting forward other values than monetary?” (See previous blog post by Tessa Zettel on this project.) Through the artistic deconstruction of the notion of a market, new cultural commons may emerge that go beyond the current drive towards more and more effective exchange, whether it happens at the macro-scales of TTIP or at the micro-scales of the so-called sharing economy.

This text was originally published in the iRights magazine Das Netz – Jahresrück­blick Netzpolitik 2015/16 and is also available online in German here.