Adhokrasi /Adhocracy
48/49
Exercising Freedom Elian Stefa
In April of 2012, four members of the heavyweight movie release group IMAGiNE—Jeramiah Perkins, 39, Gregory Cherwonik, 53, Willie Lambert, 57, and Sean Lovelady, 27—were all charged with several counts of copyright infringement. The four worked together to record, rip, and release many pirated films to the public, and according to the court records they were fully aware of the legal trouble their activities could land them in. They all pleaded guilty. Years of effort, thousands of hours of manpower, all for no tangible gain and the loss of everything that matters. They are not a bunch of tech-savvy teenagers sitting in their parents’ basements with too much time to kill, but rather individuals with families and careers and kids to feed; so what could possibly drive them to risk it all just for the oftenmisspelled appreciative comments from strangers who only knew them by their online masks? Idealism, passion, curiosity, or simple boredom? Regardless of the motive, the actions of individuals like these clearly indicate a struggle against a prevalent feeling of a deficit of relevance in our increasingly homogenized world. We live in the age of demographics and social economics, painfully aware and constantly reminded of how small we are and how little our personal actions mean. With the rise of the Internet, the Great Equalizer, we also face a crisis of the subconscious because of our inherent human desire to be important, to matter. With Adhocracy, we’re trying to find ways to frame the backlash to this crisis with the recently-found power that the individual has come to possess, through the myriad new tools born through ad-hoc and open-source methods. An exhibition to display the real-world applications of the open-source movement constitutes a double-edged sword. Such an initiative legitimizes and recognizes the potential of this social and cultural manifestation, increasing the chance of open-source’s appropriation by the mass