Engineering the privatization of the common
Tim O’Reilly was, along with Raymond, perhaps the key figure in the business part of the group of Open Source (let’s not forget that almost all of the Open Source founders were part of the FS communities to an extent) counter-revolution. Behlendorf, one of the Apache project founders, was inspired how the Internet developed through the IETF principles: rough consensus and running code, specialist working groups open to all, and Requests For Comments (RFC) documents (Moody 2001, 128). In 1999, Tim O’Reilly invited Behlendorf to develop his new ideas on open source business models. The results was a joined company which in June 2000 closed $35 million round of funding, including Dell, HP, Intel, Novell, Oracle and Sun amongst the investors (Moody 2001, 249). Early signs of a capitalist counter-revolution were encouraging.
O’Reilly’s main concerns were the new sources of profit, commoditization of software, network-enabled collaboration and software as a service (DiBona, Stone, and Cooper 2005, 255). He found inspiration in companies like Google and Amazon, praising them for their vastly profit making strategy, calling them Free Software based, yet “fiercely proprietary”:
even when using and modifying software distributed under the most restrictive of free software licenses, the GPL, these sites are not constrained by any of its provisions, all of which are conditioned on the old paradigm. The GPL’s protections are triggered by the act of software distribution, yet web-based application vendors never distribute any software: it is simply performed on the Internet’s global stage, delivered as a service rather than as a packaged software application (DiBona, Stone, and Cooper 2005, 258).
In short, Google and Amazon managed to bypass Stallman’s GPL legal hack and harness the contribution of the software and networking, without contributing back. O’Reilly is inspired by the corporations who take from the Free Software communities, without giving back. He is inspired by the new form of privatization of commons. Put more bluntly in the text that O’Reilly claimed inspired him, the central idea is to let communities produce, and let us package and sell the product and collect the profit from it:
There is huge value to be captured from commodity networks, but it is not to be found in the production of the underlying software resources. Instead, this value can be found in the distribution of platform-standardized information, and also in the form of political power (Stutz 2004).
It is only logical then that projects like Collabnet – which help corporations build and develop collaborative closed networks amongst clusters of companies – close down further communal, open process sharing aspects of software and networking communities.
In the first step, Open Source removed the ethical aspect and allowed the use of volunteer cooperative work for private profit without the mandate to contribute back, along with the Amazon/Google model. An essential step in the open process chain, return of contributions back into the open environment, was made optional. The logic of private profit, the key reason behind this removal, was imposed. The potential for the flow of cooperation was broken. A potential for closure, secrecy and extraction of private profit from the enclosed common was institutionalized.
What BSD type licences allowed, and what was happening with the relationship between corporations and universities from the beginning, was institutionalized by the OSI. BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution, and the work of people at the Department of Computer Science was extension of the AT&T UNIX shared by the corporation with the university. Eventually, AT&T took BSD to court, which prompted the project to replace all the AT&T code with a newly written code. A corporate free BSD was born (Wayner 2000, 36-39). Sun, standing for Stanford University Network, was another company emerging from a university, and having used a lot of BSD code, it had a very close relationship with Berkeley too. Yet, as it is widely known from their Java language licence, Sun stubbornly refused to take part in Free Software, sticking with Open Source (Wayner 2000, 176-8). Which does make sense from their point of view: it was the liberal approach of BSD licence, and utilization of university funded research that made their company possible.
The relationship between the state funding, universities and corporations at the forefront of new computing technologies have been a close and long standing: “Federal support has constituted roughly 70 percent of total university research funding in computer science and electrical engineering since 1976” (National Research Council USA 1999, 2). This has been an important part of the national strategy in USA, especially for building large systems:
Much of the success of major system-building efforts derives from their ability to bring together large groups of researchers from academia and industry who develop a common vocabulary, share ideas, and create a critical mass of people who subsequently extend the technology. ( Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research, National Research Council USA 1999, p8)
This all indicates that GNU project and the Free Software movement were an aberration from the planned cooperative-competitive economy that the state was promoting (Wessner and National Research Council USA 2003, 38-44). An economy in which O’Reilly’s ideas about the enclosure of the common for the private profit fit perfectly. No wonder his publishing company has thrived.
Projects like Collabnet represent a second step away from the Free Software and open process methods: capitalist friendly aspects of cooperation are enclosed inside corporations and corporate networks “utilizing the community-based model, without losing intellectual property rights to the public” (Lee and Cole, 647). Although Free Software licensing and open process practices are now widely spread in software and networking communities, exploitation of work that goes into producing Free Software and network protocols is ensured through new ways, without the necessity of privatization of the results of work, of the code: Google and Amazon being examples of this model. This was no coincidence, but a continuation of the state created and heavily funded model. In Open Source, the state got what it wanted, common production of the academic and volunteer model freely utilized for private profit. Open Source frees capitalism from Free Software.
Google search system is good example of a company utilizing the common cleverly. While Red Hat packages software produced in the common and sells it repackaged adding value in the process, Google’s similar model spreads over a far larger base, potentially covering all humans using the Internet. We produce the Web, Google sells it via services that make access to it easier. At the same time, while Google not only pays nothing to index our documents and sell them re-packaged, it charges for users that click on adverts it supplies while they are searching for something. When a Google search engine user clicks on an advert that appears on the page with search results containing number of websites, it collects money from the advertiser. However, what attracted the visitor following the advert was not the Google search engine alone, but the websites listed on the search results page. The commodity form is here combination of the labour of the common (websites on the entire Internet), and value added by Google providing better access to it. But only Google gets monetary reward for it. Their logic is that we are rewarded by Google providing better access to what we collectively produce, the content of the Internet. When a user clicks and goes away, an advert sale has been made and our website did not get a visit, it merely served to attract users and connect them with the advert from which Google profits.
Geopolitics of the common
Google is a tool for better utilization of the commons, engineered for vast private profits, whilst relying on the common production and utilization of what it provides. The larger the common, the more websites that Google can access for free and provide as searchable, the better the sales pitch to advert buyers and Google users, and larger the profits. Google utilizes the labour of the common without privatizing it. Yet, as we have seen with the most funding for technology coming from state funds in USA, Google’s PageRank patent – a concept whose history of has recently been developed (Franceschet 2010) – is held by Stanford university who also got a large number of shares in the company. While the commons are open, the source on which Google built its empire, the algorithm producing their presentation to the users, is closed. Google’s use of the data it stores on its users is also entirely opaque. Their book digitizing is another project where Google used commons to create a vast catalogue of commodities. Again, like in the case of their search system, it uses what the common produces, adds value to it by making the access easier, and repackages it into forms which accommodate profit streams. You cannot copy and paste books that google scans and provides on their website, although they might be copyright free. All of the Google’s processing power is proudly done on cheap hardware running versions of Free Software operating systems, another commons on which Google business model entirely depends.
Google confirms the thesis that ‘capitalist abstraction rests on the common and cannot survive without it, but can only instead constantly try to mystify it’ (Hardt and Negri 2009, 159). The example of estate agents is another illustration of it: ‘location, location, location’ is a name for the proximity of the property to the common, to quality of the neighbourhood. It is commons like parks, cultural events, libraries, recreation, education, child care, health, transport facilities, that give value to private property (2009, 156). Google is like estate agents, it places its services in the midst of the best common they can find. In both cases, the larger and better the common, larger their profits can grow, once embedded into the flow of the common being produced and utilized.
What can we do about it? Search systems, as several participants at the Deep Search conference noted, is an essential component of the Web. And given the importance of the Web, and its embeddedness into multiple key aspects of life, the society cannot do without one. The architecture and protocols of the Internet and the Web might be open, developed by IETF via open process, running mostly Free Software, but the architecture of search systems remains closed. This is not good enough. As part of the democratic practice of the common, we have to have search systems built on the basis of IETF and Free Software principles. We need Open Process search systems.
Search systems have four distinct components: Crawler, Index, Search and Rank, and GUI. We could and should build a public infrastructure where first two components are shared, and on top of the indexed Web, open interfaces to various Search and Rank algorithms and user interfaces are provided (Rieder 2008). There are different ways this could be done. One is through existing grid systems used in academia, this system is already distributed, staffed with highly skilled people and like the rest of the Web, mostly built using Free Software. Other option is to internationalize Google. A worldwide public organization could demand from USA to break Google search system away from the rest of the company, release all knowledge to do with how it operates (technical documentation) into the common and make it into a separate globally owned company. Democratic ownership would also ensure accountability in dealing with user data, something Google arrogantly refuses to do. The form of such global ownership, the model of the new management of the commons, remains an issue to solve. Google uses Free Software to utilize the commons (Web) as their core profit stream. Yet neither belong to any single nation.
Hence, the solution on how to manage it should not belong to any single nation’s economic and legal system – regardless of where the Google corporation, or any other entity utilizing the commons for the profit, is legally based. Indeed, in the discussion on the patenting of biological material, the question of disclosing the origin of the material part of a patent application is one of the key political issues (Howard 2008). When a seed of a Brazilian, or an Indian origin is to be patented, mandating disclosing the origin in the application can be used to deny bio-piracy by the more developed economies of the biological material originating in less developed countries. In a similar way, who gives the Google right to utilize what is common to the world, the Web, for private profit and without global accountability?
Why would we allow Google to be subject to the laws of any single state? The French state attempt to control what Google does within their web-territory renders the tension between the commons, for profit organizations and the state visible.
The question is then, why do not other organizations, in other states, do what Google does, and why not use them instead? They might do so in future better than Google does, and thus become a predominantly used system, but that is beyond the point. They would be under the same logic presented here, regardless of their location. Furthermore, i can limit my websites exposure to Google by denying their spiders access to it. That still does not address the core issues at stake here. Google would still be utilizing everything that belongs to economic system of which i’m part of, which at minimum, in the narrowest sense, is the national economy to which i pay taxes, in which i live and work, in which i produce and consume. As a member of such entity, as a citizen of a state, i want to assert the ability to dictate conditions under which anyone, including Google, utilizes anything produced by any members of the state i live in.
In other words, a state ought to control its economic affairs. Yet, with the Web, such affairs, economic activity, cannot be fully geographically located. Although i work in London/UK, the product of my work may appear is text based, and as such can be hosted by any of the servers i choose for hosting, in large number of states worldwide. Who should have a say in the economic benefits derived from what i produce? The state does it by having me immediately pay taxes on what i earn from it. Institutions which might impose and enforce copyright or patent over it might benefit long term from it too. Yet, organizations such as Google benefit economically from it as well. While the state and institutions i work for have a more direct and historical claims over my work, and while these relations are known, regulated and even democratically controlled to a very limited extent, entities like Google derive economic benefits from it without any regulation or democratic control.
Any organization that seeks to utilize the commons and that does it on the large scale should be, under the some form of democratic management of the commons. No entity should be allowed to utilize the commons without a form of such control.
In order to give credit to the remaining Google company and to keep it developing, part of the revenue from the adds would have to go to the company. The difference would be that in this case accountable organization would be setting what kind of adverts to accept, or reject, instead of relying on couple of super rich people and their sense of good and evil. Although, banning adverts for guns is a welcome decision (Lowe 2009, 140).
In short, the issue of utilization of the commons ought not be left to the capitalist corporations. First the states, like the French are trying to do now, and then us, the political multitude in becoming, should intervene. The disruption that Google’s project introduce into the sectors adopting the possibilities of new technologies, mass book scanning for example, are welcome. But not under the rules chosen by the Google’s board.
The Open Process incompatibility with capitalism
Open source, but not necessarily open process.(Asay 2009)
In the ideological cracks, understanding that the open source does not capture the most important feature of the Internet founding communities, open process, appears occasionally.
Open Source enables privatization of the commons of software and wide range of cooperative work, including volunteers, academics and engineers, in both private and public sectors. Collabnet project is further privatization of methods of cooperation. While BSD licences enabled privatization of taxpayers funded university research, Free Software set up axioms (four freedoms) to ensure that contributions to the common stay within it. Academia, its departments and research centres, is the most important location for the open process cooperation partly privatized through BSD style licences and Open Source. However, that is not where interest of corporations and capital end. Perhaps paradoxically, instead of cooperative tools and practices spreading across the rest of academia and society, these tools are being used to assert tighter control of the state and corporations over society and academia (Bousquet 2008). State recommendations and programmes for closer cooperation between the industry and academia are only part of the larger act of changing the core attributes of academic institutions and type of cooperation to the one more suitable to corporations:
Privatization means many things [...] at its most basic [...] it entails converting an institution that is based on a common good, equality, inclusion, self-governance, and ineffability of certain kinds of human development and knowledge. Converting it to one that is bound to entrepreneurship, capital appreciation, and is governed by organizational principles of hierarchy, inequality and immediate commodifiability and applicability of its endeavours. (Save the University: Wendy Brown, Part 6 2009)
The difference between the model of academic institutions and the corporate model is here clearly laid out. The separation between Free Software and Open Source lies on similar lines. University is in the process of being converted to the market model penetrating all aspects of life, Brown continued, in which you keep what you earn, and no democracy can tell you otherwise. In other words, private property is out of the reach of the democratic political order under capitalism. Similarities between Brown’s description of the university lie with Internet founding communities, especially Free Software. Open Source on the other hand, negates some of those core attributes of university, claiming falsely pragmatism over ideology. What they do not say is that such move entails loss of what Richard Stallman and Wendy Brown talk about: loss of one set of features in favour of a different one. Privatization is a procedure of reduction of the circle of decision makers over matters being privatized to those who, through the idea of the constitutional order and the rule of law (Hardt and Negri 2009, 8-16), get assigned ownership over it.
Capitalism and its neoliberal form are not neutral, non-ideological systems. When you apparently have no beliefs other than making a profit, you are not just a pragmatist. You are a capitalist, today most likely a neoliberal one. Open Source position is one hostile to the common, and hostile to the academia and open process ways. Pleasing capitalist investors while betraying the emancipatory potentials, the ideology of Open Source Initiative cannot be anything else but a capitalist one.
Its formation was like the fall of the Berlin wall: instead of the promised unification, we got new, perhaps even harder and more entrenched, divisions. Instead of what Western liberals praised as democratic revolutions in East Europe, in most of the states switching to capitalism we got tyrannies of mafia, church and unregulated capitalist lords, with the destruction of security, education and health provision for most citizens. As the final insult in this, in the case of ex-Yugoslavia utterly failed, capitalist-liberal Alice in Wonderland scenario, the brick wall across a single city of Berlin was replaced with the Schengen barbwire across most of Europe.
Having the same ideological source, Open Source is a similar decoy. It splits, what it claimed will unite. The change that it introduced in licensing and perception of volunteer cooperative software production further strengthens the corporations, whose anti-democratic neoliberal march against the rights of workers and the powers of the common has been consistent and strong since the fall of Berlin wall.
Contrary to it, Open Process can open up the political field, allowing for new forms of directly democratic rethinking of HOW do we, as workers, as institutions, as boroughs, as cities, as states, as networks, or just as groups of associated geographically unrelated humans, cooperate – both as volunteers and as democratically organized wage labourers.
Open Process is, in others words, a democratic potential of our egalitarian commu(o)nist future. Open Source denied us from having it. By its clever twists of history, and corporate collaborations, it temporarily denied us of the possibility of seeing the potential that tools and practices of the Internet and Web founding communities hold. This is an attempt to claim it back.
In order for such future to open up, the questions of economic, political and juridical association for cooperative production for the commons remain the biggest theoretical and practical tasks to be developed. Neither of the forms of capitalist firm, political party, or NGO seem capable of utilizing the Open Process and the Internet Model ways of cooperation.
Most important problem is that both Free Software and IETF cooperations rely on the work being paid in advance, on the time to engage being readily available; as reflected in the roots of hacking being in academia and research centres, within mostly self-managed groups, largely funded by the state. This does not remove the most fundamental relationship, one of capitalist wage labour, from the overall analytical framework that aims to enable reuse of hacking and open processes across society. However, it does suggest that these new forms of cooperation can and do coexist with capitalist wage labour. An easy, but incorrect and partial, way to explain this is to emphasise the importance of Free Software production to capitalism.
Capitalism needed Open Source because Free Software was an uneasy fit (Prug 2007, 79-83). For Stallman, contributions to society deserve reward ‘only in so far as society is free to use the results’. Applying this rule to the economy puts us straight into the logic of left egalitarian though and its political movements, where sharing across the society was one of the most fundamental principles and practices. Left critics often point out that scarcity is actively produced in capitalism. Yet, for Stallman, ‘In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the post-scarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living’. This is what workers movements fought for since the industrial revolution.
Most importantly, the question of surplus value is also expressed clearly in the GNU Manifesto: ‘We have already greatly reduced the amount of work that the whole society must do for its actual productivity, but only a little of this has translated itself into leisure for workers because much non-productive activity is required to accompany productive activity.’ However, Stallman fails to identify capitalism as a reason for the surplus value not being shared across society: ’The main causes of this are bureaucracy and isometric struggles against competition.’ It is striking that regardless of it, the main reason for doing Free Software for Stallman could be lifted out of many left political texts: along with insisting on the right to inspect, modify, share and form communities, he asserts, ‘We must do this, in order for technical gains in productivity to translate into less work for us.’(Stallman 2009)
This central point of GNU Manifesto cannot be situated by a reading of Free Software and Open Source only along the liberal ideas like free speech(Vasile 2009), although free speech undeniably plays a crucial role (Coleman 2009). More important, reduction of the time Stallman mentions, technical gains in productivity to translate into less forced wage labour, cannot be squared with the central liberal tenet of private property, nor its extension into the right to private accumulation and private use of wealth. For Stallman’s claim to become feasible, a necessary rapid increase in social, shared wealth – becoming possible through advances in technology and knowledge – would have to be developed and managed under a new political, economic and legal system of and for the common.
For Antonio Negri, in the search for a good society, emphasis should be on the need to construct together instruments to form the common, without looking for guarantees, but knowing ‘how to construct’. These instruments should be ‘rules of law, economic rules, rules of technology, rules of organization’ (2004, 89). Hackers becoming trained in law and using it to their benefit (Coleman 2009, 448-9) to increase the common, while developing new technologies and organizational forms, fits exactly what Negri is describing. Furthermore, the meaning of work and cooperation, its truth, resides in the common:
there is no truth outside the common — outside what can belong to everyone and what can be verified in language, in cooperation, and in work. A truth is a collective action on the part of persons who campaign together and who transform themselves. I see action as something that constitutes the community, that produces the substance of our dignity and our life. The meaning of action is posited at this level.(Negri 2004, 26)
Is this not a plausible reading of the work of Internet founding communities, especially that of Free Software? In an even more precise formulation, the link between the production and transfer of those practices to the political realm is made: ‘The self-transformation of the multitude in production, grounded in the expansion of the common, gives an initial indication of the direction of the self-rule of the multitude in the political realm.’ (Hardt and Negri 2009, 177)
In other words, IETF and Free Software practices are that models that we ought to try to reuse, adopt in the political sphere. Increased autonomy of labour and its increased technical composition, reduction of the role of bosses who are often just an obstacle to get work done, all point out to the democratic capacities people exercise daily. And although these capacities do not immediately translate into new political democratic organizations, they are a solid basis on which to imagine and construct them (2009, 353). The basis for this move from the production to the political organization is continuous process of making, ‘an uninterrupted process of collective self-transformation’ (2009, 173). Opening and expanding access to the common ‘means seizing control of the means of production and reproduction’. In practice, it means also ‘reappropriating the common’ (2009, 164).
At the centre of this lies biopolitical production, production of scientific knowledge being a good example of it. Broad scientific community has access to shared ideas, methods, results of work. Only through open circulation of these, through journals, conferences, books, website, blogs, is production of science possible. Results must be made common, for a ‘virtuous cycle that leads from the existing common to a new common’ to occur (2009, 145). Today science is moving even further than this. The pace of publication is becoming faster, with some journals publishing immediately upon acceptance [ref], and some even publishing prior to peer reviews [ref]. Some scientist and communities strive to have their data open, while some even keep the entire process open, using the concept of Open Notebook science [ref]. All these are moves towards an open-process production of common. Scientific communities are starting to adopt the hacker culture.
Which brings us to the problem of privatization, enclosure of knowledge and technologies, especially through patents and copyright being the biggest obstacles in the enlargement and development of the production of the common and its open-process form. Google is a prime example of a new form of rent, positioned at the heart of the global common. It utilizes the Web, and our contributions, our common wealth, by provision of services through which it implants itself in the middle of each connection made in the vast pools of common production and communication, selling our activity without seemingly much interference. How much interruption can you claim because of the Google adds?
What Open Source reveals is how do parasitic activity of the new technologies in the hands of corporation and capital develop to appropriate the cooperation, and ‘only a sharpened tool can reveal the movements of the parasite.’ Immaterial rent, patents and copyrights, have ’changed its coordinates of exploitation’, hence ‘a new theory of rent demands a new theory of sabotage before aiming to any new form of organization’ (Pasquinelli 2008, 11). This would make sense, if we knew what was sabotaged in the first place: what are the starting points, what was the form of cooperation, and what is the value of its re-application for egalitarian ideas and movements. But we don’t. Our own concepts and understandings of it have been shaped for the last ten years by strong liberal, capitalist and representational discourses, lead by the Open Source Initiative and the Creative Commons.
The history of our cooperative practices and capacities is constantly being rewritten and appropriated by the capital and its ideologues. Sabotage is temporary, and it accepts the other side as the main actor in the relationship. Open process way and history of hacking shows, it is capital that had to react to our innovative cooperation.
The point of this analysis and our task in general, is not to show how events were, or what ideological constructs accompanied them. Instead, ‘the task is to unearth the hidden potentialities (the utopian emancipatory potentials) which were betrayed‘ (Žižek 2006, 77). Most of works in social sciences are strictly focused on describing and comparatively analysing. Yet, as Brown (2005, 80) puts is succinctly, theory is ‘incommensurate with description’; it does not simply decipher the meanings, but ‘recodes and rearranges them in order to reveal something about the meanings and incoherencies that we live with’. To do so, theory has to be partly speculative, ‘it must disregard the conventional meanings’, as it violates the selfreprsentation of things:
Theory’s most important political offering is this opening of a breathing space between the world of common meanings and the world of alternative ones, a space of potential renewal for thought, desire, and action. (Brown 2005, 81)
The history of the Internet and Web founding communities is, like all other histories, open. This is an attempt to provide another instance of it, one less entangled into the liberal capitalist discourse, and one which ‘expresses its potential in terms of the potential of the whole of the dispossessed classes’ (Wark 2004, 096). What has been stolen from us, we will steal back. The sabotage is theirs. The substance is ours.
The desires and the sources of emancipatory potential of the commons for the cooperative and egalitarian togetherness, for a new communism born through the new generation of tools and organizational practices, have temporarily been appropriated and hi-jacked by capitalism under the Open Source and to an extent Creative Commons movements. Through and with the Open Process methods of the founding Internet communities, we can make a significant step towards claiming it back. Commu(o)nism, we could call it, is a new emerging form of communism hacked with open process and new commons. The small (o) in the middle stands for open.
References:
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