Hack the State is part of the book subtitle that i’m currently writing. It is also part of the PhD i’m doing. This is a place where i’ll be developing as many papers, ideas, chapter, as possible. Any subsequent versions, including those resulting from peer reviews and editorial suggestions, will also be published here.
I’m writing directly into the blog web interface, using Zotero to collect references and create bibliography. I use the same tag for all references used in a text, which enables me to click on tag belonging to a text in Zotero to see all the references; select them all; right-click and export to bibliography (choose from huge selection of styles); paste in blog text. This is far from ideal, as referencing order is not kept. For more densely referenced texts, this system will most likely prove too time consuming to be worth using. I’ll switch to Open Office when that happens and keep somehow new versions in sync with the blog.
I’ll also be developing the platform, Wordpress, plugins and themes, to suit my needs. For example, i need the ability to offer subscription to version changes. So that when i update a text to a new version, let’s say 0.6, all feeds (RSS, etc) will show this version change as a new feed entry, showing the version number too. Instead of the short summary, i want versions feed to show colored diffs. This way, readers can see exactly what has changed. Ideally, i’d like to integrate changelog as metadata in each text, so that my changelog entry for each change can be displayed at the top of the diff (rough idea is here). I’d love to see one day reader making comments, annotations, to specific diffs, version releases. I’d like to be able to do so with the kind of work that i like read: being able to follow its development in RSS reader and single-click to comment on a specific new argument part of a version. [08 Aug 09]: Alpha version of RSS Latest Updates feed is available here – it’s similar to recent changes in wiki.
In terms of collaborative processes, coming from software and networking collaboration to academia is a shockingly unpleasant experience. One is meant to reveal one’s work only through books and journals, and it takes years for books and journals to be written, edited, peer reviwed, and finally published. Even then, only with Open Access one gets electronic distribution of the work. For me though, although Open Access if an inspiring movement on whose goals i work at my department, general advocacy and through FreeOurBooks project, Open Access falls short in several crucial ways. It’s is incredibly slow to wait for a year, two, or three (it takes a year for a book to appear in bookshops once final written version is handed to a publisher – and this is standard, i’m told) to get in the dialogue about one’s work. To get feedback, to recognize its virtues and shortcomings better and to continue development. Sure, peer reviews are there to warrant quality, which is an important part of any scientific work. Still, they too are too slow, opaque and quite counter-productive to my tastes developed through collaborations in software, networking and political activism. I prefer you, a reader of this blog, and a potential contributor, to judge it on your own. And then judge how peers judged it.
There’s one fundamental difference in the concept of the peer in electronic networks and in academia, or politics. In academia and politics, a peer is a specialist whose special attributes make him a peer: knowledge in academia, political decision making power in politics. In networks, a peer is any node that conforms to protocols used and accept them as a set of rules to participate in the exchange. There’s a place for both models in production of knowledge. But given the Internet Model collaborative methodology and tools at our disposal, what i want is an Open Process model of knowledge production. Model which will combine aspect of the Internet Model and current, existing academic production.
As to to the more explicitly political side of the book and the project, read on …
The title and the theme of this website, Hack the State, developed through my reaction to the papers presented at the On the Idea of Communism conference. There are three fundamental objections to the content of the conference which lead me to the concept of an imperative call, and now the theoretico-practical project, to hack the state:
1) anti-State is a political/philosophical suicide. Instead, we need to Hack the State (hack as reuse by clever re-purposing of what’s already here), to make it do what we want it to do.
2) Thinking through the concept of Ideas is not enough. We need to think about/through Objects. Objects that will enable us to transform the State and advance our political goals.
3) Theoretical concepts and practices of communism need revising in the spirit of tools and production methods (collaborative principles) through which the consciousness of currently living beings is developing. Centralization has to go out. Volunteer based open-process organization & cooperation in.
You can read a bit more on these objections here.
A lot more detail on these points will be coming in posts on the blog.
