What Is Liber.Us?

There are a vast number of websites, each building their own membership communities, their own user bases, each designed to cluster and group niches into feedback loops.
Myspace, Orkut, and Facebook are only a few of the names that come to mind. I haven’t heard yet of Orkutwhores.com, but Myspace all on it’s own has pimped the fuck out of social networks to the point they’re all loose and floppy. There’s a real art in cobbling together an interstitial digital space that empowers the individual rather than feeding into the hegemon,
and this very ideology has driven GreenAI to rethink how a community space could be interlinked. The result is the curious network Liber.Us which has been evolving rapidly since it was launched earlier this year.

Wes Unruh:

You’re GreenAI, you’ve been behind a number of websites that I’ve been on in the last two or three years, and now specifically lately you’re behind “Liber.US”

GreenAI:
Liber “dot” us

is my first real attempt to break out of the whole community website mold with my work, and rather than try to get this distinct entity with this brand and this flavor that people can grab onto and label
themselves with, I wanted to make it easier for people to publish media. It’s exactly what they have at wordpress.com but it’s open-source, so I modified it so it would work with some other sites, and I’ve created a system so you can publish to a number of sites, and the idea is that you can promote this way to different communities more effectively from your own central site.

GreenAI on Liber.Us Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

To me I see it as a new way to ‘Free Us’ = ‘liber dot us’ = free us. The media is controlled. When the media is controlled, the consumers of the media are controlled. So I thought that the best way to free ourselves would be to take back the media. And so that’s what I’m trying to do.

WU:

That makes a lot of sense. I know it does use wordpress, so that’s pretty easy off the bat, there’s tons of help files out there for it. But you don’t just have WordPress installed, you selected a number of plug-ins that wouldn’t be available to the regular person who just makes a wordpress site.

G:

There’s a good bunch of plug-ins developed for wordpress. And I’ve tried to go select the best of them and I’m open to any suggestions if somebody wants another thrown in there. So now you can publish any kind of media file: video, audio, text, whatever.

And you can do it in a format that creates a podcast feed that you can send out to any kind of aggregator, or Itunes, or any of those places. And there’s also shopping cart software you can set up your own store and you can sell whatever you want. And you can do this in an environment that has 333 templates available to you, and you can customize any of them.

So basically you can make your site look like whatever you want it to look like. You can even get a full domain, and we can arrange it so you could have a full domain on your liber site and nobody would even know it was a liber site.

WU:

So if you buy a domain name you could just point it at a liber site and mask it.

G:

Exactly.

WU:

Part of the reason your name is GreenAI, outside of your day job and all the associations you have with artificial intelligence and shit, is because of.. well, we’ve debated expanding certain aspects or anonymity online to facilitate.. Fuck. I don’t know how to bring up piracy. How should we talk about piracy?

G:

Piracy. Piracy is something that tends to come from countries that don’t have as developed of a control structure. And I think piracy is something that is necessary, and it keeps the world healthier, it keeps things in balance, because people try to charge outrageous prices for things when they can control the supply of it regardless of whether or not they actually have any right to control that supply. And that is a much bigger crime in my eyes than just sharing a few files.

I personally define artificial intelligence and computers in general as products of the collective human psyche, and as that I think it should be.. you shouldn’t be able to patent software. There should be no copyrights on software at all, it’s ridiculous to say that there is. You can’t copyright an algorithm because it’s just reality.

When you centralize all the power in one place, it fucks everything up. Academics recognize that if you put somebody up on a pedestal too much, they’re probably going to slip, and they need to have peer review, and they need to keep sharp on their shit, because that’s a reality. And I think that a lot of hackers have that same mentality, it’s a matter of “what is possible” not “what am I allowed to do?”

And when you have people designing software that is going to be owned by some corporation, I feel you are selling chunks of humanity to these corporations which are not living entities, they’re immortal undead beings and they’re heartless and they’re soulless and they’re sucking the life from the world. That’s my attitude. But I kind of work for one, so that’s a dilemma in my life.

WU:

Talking about your project, and how you’re planning on expanding it in the future…

G:

Basically what I want to do is I want to create a seed server to store stuff that I think is valuable to be preserved and spread, but hasn’t saturated the .torrent scene. A lot of this stuff can be really hard to get as time goes on. And say there was some kind of collapse somewhere, a lot of shit could be lost very quickly. But the more we spread it around the world, the less that’s likely to happen.

And this to me takes precedent over any kind of copyright issues. And if I can make arrangements to make something like this to happen, then I think that’s a beautiful thing.

WU:

I think so too, and I’m really fascinated by the idea. And Liber.Us is all… you just need an email and a password to start an account, and to use all the plug-ins.. it’s all free. And the idea of creating a database where people can archive the media that’s most important for them, all for free, then you’ve created a library for the internet that’s user-operated and maintained.

G:

That’s pretty much exactly what I’m thinking. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do and I’ve tried it in many times and in many different forms. The media when you come down to it is just ideas that you’re propagating. And I think that it’s very important that we reflect what we’re seeing, and the reality that we’re experiencing, because if we don’t, then all we’re going to know is what is fed to us.

Thanks to GreenAI.Liber.Us