[hide] 1 Introduction and context 2 Hack the State: a concept in transition 3 Notes and references 4 Appendix 1. (Original) Proposal for residence at Access Space Sheffield in the fall of 2009 5 Appendix 2. First interim/ preliminary report on my ‘Hacking Society’ project. Friday, March 12, 2010 6 Appendix 3. Second interim/ preliminary report on my ‘Hacking Society’ project. [...]]]>

HACK THE STATE?

Substantive report on my artist-in-residency at Sheffield’s Access Space,
March 8-27, 2010.

http://www.access-space.org

Introduction and context

In the second half of 2009 I applied for and was awarded a one month
residency with Access Space, the ‘Free Media Lab’ in Sheffield, UK. This
residency took place during the largest part of March of this year (2010).

The project I submitted for consideration was termed “Hacking Society” and
was inspired by Toni Prug’s initiative “Hack the State”
(http://hackthestate.org). Its leading idea was to research on the
opportunities (and actual occurrences) for citizens collectives to have
the machinery of government work with and for them instead of the other
way round by opening up its structure and mechanisms. Indeed, to ‘hack’
the state. (see Appendix … for the full description of the original idea).

The format of this research, apart from site-specific requests voiced by
Access Space, was in my mind to be very similar to the research I
undertook while in residency with the French Media Lab APO33 in October
2008. This enquiry had hackers, and hackers-related events, initiatives,
’spaces’, and ‘texts’ as its subject. The idea being to compile a
‘reasoned catalog’ of such occurrences, along with a tentative theoretical
exposition of their nature and their ways of coming about [1]

This relatively straightforward model, with regard to both idea and format
did not turn out to be practicable however. This was mainly due to the
fact that issue at stake proved in the course of looking at it far more
complex than I initially envisaged, something that also manifested itself
spectacularly in developments that took place in its immediate aftermath.

The consequence is that reporting on the subject matter of this residency
did not only turn unfortunately slow – for which I offer my apologies -
but also remains very much a ‘work in progress’ , or in less charitable
terms, an unfinished business.

Hack the State: a concept in transition

“Armed revolutionaries and anarchists hate the state. Social democrats
want to be the state. I say we better hack it.”
(http://hackthestate.org)

In my original idea, hacking the state was quite simply about motivating
people to acquire the necessary knowledge of the ways – both open and
covert – the state is functioning and apply this knowledge to make, or
even force, the state to work for the benefit of the people and not for
its own institutional sake. And in our times, the broad diffusion of
information technology tools and of Internet access has considerably
enhanced the opportunities to do just that. In this regard, I was greatly
inspired by my experience as member of the Dutch ‘We do not trust voting
computers’ action group (WVSCN) [2]. This collective of computer hackers
and legal activists managed to scuttle the hitherto near-universal use of
voting computers in local and national elections in the Netherlands [3].
Even though WVSCN was a very unique citizen action group in terms of
professional membership and financial resources, it seemed to provide an
inspiring example of how to carry out a successful ‘hack’ on the status
quo, even if the initial odds are not looking good at all [4].

But as I embarked into a search for this sort of initiatives, especially
in the United Kingdom, I quickly encountered numerous manifestations of
something I found puzzling at first, and then rather disquieting: a
reverse phenomenon to ‘hack the state’, namely “the state (is)hacking Us”.
this happens when the state, or rather one of its variegated agencies,
makes use of exactly the same approaches and technologies to ‘plug into’
the citizenry, and extract the information it needs for ‘good governance’
(and fostering a positive attitude to the same in the process…).

I realized at that that stage that the whole idea of hacking the state
(and its opposite) cannot be explained and understood without reference to
the general context of the political evolution of society in the past 30
years. Whereas IT and the Internet have greatly facilitated the gathering,
exchange , and use of information, the nature of polity and politics
itself had enormously changed. Political scientists have subsumed this
evolution under the moniker ‘the crisis of representation’ [5].

‘The crisis of representation’, at least in my view, can basically be
described as a state of mutual distrust that has arisen in the past 30
years [6] between people and politics – that is between the governing and
the governed – where the people feel their interests are no longer the
primary preoccupation of the government, and politicians in their turn
feel that they do not longer ‘understand’ the governed – in case they have
not entirely lost touch with them (see my second interim residency reports
in appendix 3 for more on the subject).

The crisis of representation has many aspects and consequences, but the
one that is particularly relevant to us here is that it constrained or
even closed altogether the traditional channels of communication between
the governing and the governed. Where unions, political parties, and the
media either lost the trust of the public [7], or did no longer cater to
its interests, administrative authorities looked for new strategies to
obtain that input from the public they desperately need for governance to
work. New participative mechanisms and instruments were pressed into
service, many of them based on IT applications, and these are often nearly
indistinguishable from ‘hacking the state’ endeavors.

In fact, while mapping out all the initiatives that aimed at enhancing
participation of the citizenship in the realm of politics, I came to the
conclusion that there was something of a continuum covering both ‘Hack the
State’ and ‘The State (is) Hacking Us’ projects (’HtS’ and ‘tSHU’
respectively), and that it was sometimes difficult to distinguish the one
from the other. That is even more so when their set up actually enabled
one thing while officially being geared to the other.

The cases of ‘Rewired State’ and ‘Data.gov.uk’, for instance, [8] are
exemplary in this regard: both have been started and are owned by Her
Majesty’s government for its own purpose, yet both enable HtS activities,
one by making public, yet not easily available, data accessible
(Data.gov.uk) while the other provides opportunity to learn a lot about
the inner workings of the government machinery [9]. Another noticeable
aspect of all these initiatives is their lack of ambition, which is
probably deliberate. None were aiming at any, let alone a radical, change
in the power relationship between citizens and government – they are all
about plugging the gap that had been caused by the disintegration of the
classical consultative structures which used to be provided by unions,
political parties, and other class or social categories-based
establishments.

Before going on, another feature that should, in my opinion, be
prominently taken into account in our analysis, is the current economic
and financial crisis, one which has resulted in the further reduction of
the ‘window to the future’ – that is the period of time ahead of which
political courses and decision making can be formulated with an acceptable
degree of credibility. Neo-liberal capitalism, now running amuck, has
relentlessly narrowed it from years to months to weeks – and now any given
situation can change dramatically within days, or less, see the ups and
downs of the European currency.

Together with the above this leads me to a third,and ebven more
disquieting layer of ’state hacks’: those concerning what in Turkey and
Indonesia has come to be defined as “the Deep State”, where the core and
crux of state powers (or that of the ‘ruling class’) resides [9].

‘Hacking the State’ and ‘the State Hacks Us’ are narratives that can, with
some dose of creativity, be constructed as ‘thesis’ and ‘anti-thesis’,
asking to be resolved in some sort of constructive (or at least
satisfyingly descriptive) ’synthesis’. This alas, is not to be, at least
not in my opinion. And the reason lies in the discreet but defining
presence of the ‘deep state’ in the background of every political
situation, at whatever scale.

What is common to both ‘Hack the State’ and ‘the State Hacks Us’ is that
face of politics known as governance, with other words the everyday,
mundane business of government. It refers to the role of the state in
making society ‘work’ on a very practical and material basis. Upholding
the rule of law (in common matters), ensuring the functioning of public
services, maintaining a democratic and benevolent (or at least neutral)
dispensation between the governing and the governed. It does include areas
of conflict, sometimes violent, as well as negotiations, compromises, and
settlements, not all unilateral. And to a large extent, possession and
exercise of power is surely involved. It is in this realm that the game of
‘hacking’, ‘us’ ‘them’, and ‘them’ us’, is played out.

But ‘governance’ is not, in last instance, what real political power is
about, and where it is situated. ‘the State Hacks Us’ initiatives have the
- default rather than intended – characteristic to request participation,
pick up – or if you wish, exploit/ plunder – ideas and invite involvement
- without of course sharing decision-making power. Yet all this finds
place within fairly well-known and predictable parameters: matters of
public services, planning, maybe some local political issues. The ‘Deep
State’ is about unpredictability, especially in times of crisis – whether
it has caused it or not [10].

Can the ‘Deep State’ be ‘hacked’? Shortly after I completed my residence
with Access Space, Wikileaks caused a major upheaval in the media by
broadcasting a video of the shooting incident involving US Army helicopter
over Baghdad in 2007, where a Reuter journalist and a number of civilians
were killed, apparently in cold blood (”Collateral Murder”). The outrage
was enormous, and Wikileaks’ extensive hoard of hitherto secret, ‘leaked’
documents, received much publicity. It was inferred that the power that be
were henceforth no longer immune to the exposure of their dirty laundry.
This sentiment was further enhanced by Iceland’s Wikileaks inspired and
supported ‘Modern Media’ initiative (still in progress to become a data
haven for confidential information and threatened sources (see IMMI’s site
http://immi.is/?l=en ) It now looked as if the carapace of the state, even
in its ‘deep’ … state, could be prized open.

But does Wikileaks – and apparented approaches – represent an effective
strategy of ‘hacking the (deep) state’? To a certain extent for sure, as
openness and publicity is the enemy of arbitrary power. But to a certain
extent only, because of the somewhat ‘Spy vs Spy’ nature of such
exercises. Wikileaks itself suffers from a lack of transparency and hence
accountability – it (f)actually rejects both – besides being handicapped
by its small size, elitist constituency, and financial shakiness.

But then how should the ‘deep state’ be tackled? To me, it appears to be
extremely difficult to offer a solution that would not include a wholesale
and revolutionary overhaul of the full concept of state power itself.

Piecemeal improvements, obtained through what was our first area of
concern and research, ‘Hacking the State’ in its simple form, remains
certainly feasible in the meantime, and is likely to be rewarding. It
should be conducted in a diligent, continuous, and broad-based
participative manner. Many movements act in this fashion, sometimes
bypassing altogether the concept and the issues of governance as
understood by political bureaucrats and managers. They should
wholeheartedly be joined and supported! [11].

=========

Notes and references

[1] see http://www.apo33.org/dokapo/doku.php?id=open_ars_-_2008_2009
(English text under the French one)

[2] http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English

[3] This did not happen from one day to the next however. The campaign to
wave the public, the media and in the end, the government was long and
protracted and demanded an arduous passage, with a steep learning curve,
into the intricacies of the Dutch administrative and legislative system
and the foxiness of the “law on the openness of government action” – the
Dutch Freedom of Information Act.

[4] I used to quip that we went though the classic ‘Mahatma Gandhi’
phases: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight
you, then you win.”

[5] Of course, this does not – and by far – cover the whole, massive
changes our (western) societies have gone through, but I think it is the
single most important phenomenon regarding our relationship with politics
and governance.

[6] Probably the period defined by the Reagan-Thatcher years. the ‘crisis’
resonates with the latter’s famous “there is no such thing as society”, a
statement that also delegitimizes politics – but not the state…

[7] Unions, out of choice or forced by legislation, as in the UK, narrowed
their focus strictly on workfloor labour relations and no longer convey -
are even forbidden to – a political program. The major political parties,
as they move to the ‘centre’ actually do not longer represent a really
existing constituency, but merely a particular flavor of (more or less
imagined) middle class opinion. The media finally, have basically become
corporate mouthpieces, their ‘objectivity’ reduced to avoiding causing
offense.

[8] http://rewiredstate.org/ It’s mission statement: “Rewired State runs
hackdays where developers show government what is possible, and government
shows developers what is needed.” http://data.gov.uk : “Unlocking
innovation, Working with UK Public Sector information and Data”.

[9] “deep state’ (in Turkish ‘derim devlet’) is a more precise term than
the usual ’state within the state’ monicker, which is vague and fails to
highlight its permanent precedence over and above the more visible,
public, and usually benevolent layer of government.

[10] Giorgio Agamben defines sovereignty (i.e. state power) as ‘the power
to declare the state of emergency’. A somewhat cryptic yet precise
pronouncement: it is the moment where the state, that is its incumbents,
shuffle everything aside, and exercise arbitrary power. Even at the best
of times, that moment is always nearer than most people realize.

[11] A specific area of concern was expressed by my friend Cees Hamelink
just the other afternoon (over drinks He opined that as ‘freedom of
information’ legislation was extended, more and more official data and
information, even of the apparently innocuous variety, were going
underground and kept under the seal of confidentiality, invoking various
’security’ or ‘privacy’, or simply commercial/ financial considerations.
The struggle is clearly not over…

………………………………………………………………

Appendixes

==========================

Appendix 1. (Original) Proposal for residence at Access Space Sheffield in the fall of 2009

Proposal title (if it has one): Hacking Society!

Description of the project:

Hacking Society should be understood both as ‘hacking society’, as in
‘hacking a (computer) program, and as ‘the hacking society’, i.e. the
(informal) association of people, and their ideas about … hacking society:
making the state, corporate, and other institutional structures working
for you instead of the other way round. In the way of a favourite Foucauld
metaphor: like judokas, using the opponent’s strength as lever for your
own.

The main inspiration for this proposal is Toni Prug’s ‘Hacking the State’
initiative, itself part of a much broader endeavour to ‘open’ the
structures and mechanisms that influence and often dictate our lives as
individual citizens, communities, and non-state, non-corporate actors in
general. A fine example of this is what was achieved by the Dutch hackers
and political activist group “we do not trust voting computers” (of which
I was member), scuttling, against considerable odds, the entire electronic
voting infrastructure (and the associated political mindset) of the
Netherlands.

All over the world there are many more such initiatives eroding the
carapace of secrecy, back-hand dealings, collusion/ corruption, and
unchecked, arbitrary, and arrogant exercise of power that is,
unfortunately, characteristic of political power structures at any given
level or place. Various and very diverse grass-root, ‘civil society’ (not my
favourite word btw) groups have taken a leaf from the F/OSS (Free and/or
Open Source Software) movement’s book. Just as this movement broke the
monopoly of proprietary ICT, they want to break free of structural
constraints imposed from above in the matter of knowledge and power to
decide and act. The F/OSS movement has provided them, albeit often
indirectly, a basic, non party-political, ideology for a much more
extensive call for ‘free’ (”as in freedom”) and ‘open’. And so, ‘new’ social
movements are using a whole gamut of institutional, para-institutional,
and extra-institutional instruments, as well as a wide array of strategies
and tactics to expose and grind down the stronghold corporate and
government forces exercises on our lives to limit, if not altogether
suppress, our fundamental freedoms.

I propose to reflect about how this cross-pollination took place, but
mostly to look at a number of these initiatives in a fairly descriptive way
with the aim to arrive at a ‘catalogue raisonne’ (or explicative list) of
what is going on in terms of such initiatives, and what, in view of their
aims and the context in which they operate, they have been able to achieve
so far (and possibly also speculate on what theymight achieve in future!).

I would naturally focus on the place taken by IC technologies in the
operation and organization of such initiatives, and more particularly on
the role of independent practitioners of ICT, variously known as hackers,
techies, nerds, geeks, and what have you

Similar to my residence with APO33 in Nantes (France) in October 2008,
when I looked at the various venues, events, and organizational set-ups of
the ‘hackers movement’, this should result in an article, backed up by a
comprehensive list of links, illustrating the ‘hacking society’ concept by
evidencing its occurrence. This article and links could be published
on Access Space’s (research) blog or website, and further distributed by
posting on mailing lists and other community media, including of course
those most involved in the issues at stake. A (public) talk/ discussion
about this research is also perfectly feasible and welcome as far as I am
concerned.

And last, but most certainly not least, I would tremendously enjoy
dialoguing and sharing experiences with the members/ visitors/ residents
of Access Space, and would not hesitate to devote considerable time to
that purpose. Closeted research has never really been my cup of chai…

===============================

Appendix 2. First interim/ preliminary report on my ‘Hacking Society’ project. Friday, March 12, 2010

As my research (slowly) progresses I am coming to the somewhat
disheartening (if interim) conclusion that ‘hacking the state’ is rather
the exception and ‘the state hacking us’ (Toni Prug) actually the rule.
This can be seen from the numerous initiatives deployed by various
governmental bodies and authorities in Europe to tap into the knowledge
represented by individual citizens or ‘civil society’ organisations in
order to both further their ‘governance’ agenda and to lend legitimation
to their politicies by giving them the veneer of citizen participation.
These initiatives are almost always backed up by the use of advanced IT
(giving them a very ‘kewle’, ‘clued-in’, sheen), and more often than not
involving social institutions in a consulting, if not leading, role -
alas.

This is of course not so surprising in view of the developments in Western
societies over the past 30 years, basically after the
Thatcherite-Reaganian revolution (or reaction and the demise in the
belief both of the ‘great narratives’, and more prosaically, of the
welfare state. This has been characterized, at the individual level, by an
increasing ‘atomisation’ of the subjects, a ‘precarisation’ of their
material circumstances, and the gradual (near-)disappearance of the
effectiveness and credibility of their operative organisations (labour
unions, political parties), as subsumed in the well-worn phrase ‘the
crisis of representation’. On the other hand, the state has increasingly
shed its social, political, and economic commitment to the citizenry at
large, replacing it by a (individual) ‘client (customer) approach’ model,
the fig leaf for its relentless drive to become a corporate business
machine like that of any other big enterprise, albeit one with sovereign
rights, i.e. holding the legal, and ultimate, monopoly of physical
violence. (’Ultima Ratio Regum’ was already the phrase engraved on the
mouths of the Sun King’s – Louis XIV – canons …)

Such developments have completely turned the tables on the population in
general which is now basically left to its own (rather limited) devices in
front of the onslaught of both corporate and etatic might (which are
increasingly indistinguishable anyway). So we have now a situation of
far-reaching, sometimes near-absolute, imbalance and inequality, not
easily remedied in the present circumstances, material and ideological.
Seen in this light, the ‘Hack the State’ moniker quickly gets
overshadowed, as said above, by its reverse: the state and corporations
hacking us, and that constantly, and not in a small measure. This happens
within the context of another hallowed ‘post-modern’ development: the
information society and the paramount role played by knowledge (in terms
of work this is subsumed by ‘post-fordism’ and ‘immaterial labour’
respectively). This is not the place to go very much further into this
issue, but for one very important feature.

The element of conflict and the realisation of very divergent and
irreconcilable interests between the two sides has been deftly obscured
and effectively evacuated from the public discourse, just as it has been
one-sidedly escalated in practice, albeit in a way that ‘is not making the
headlines’. Objectives and processes that are contradictory to the
interest of the people and the absence of their actual involvement in the
decisions that shape their lives has been succesfully fudged by numerous
attempts to ‘include’ them, on strictly individual basis, in the
governance ‘consultation’ process (or, for corporates, in products or
services development), suggesting participation and democratic mechanisms,
while in the end it are the real and ultimate interests of the powers that
be which prevail. Yet in the meanwhile a most valuable mass of information
has been gathered, usually with no remuneration to the purveyors of the
same.

It is therefore, at this stage a bit tricky to envisage ‘hacking the
state’ -or ‘time to hack back’ (Toni Prug, again) with high optimism. But
this is only a preliminary report, meant to chart a view on the present
(’departure’) situation. Rather that giving in to immediate and
hypothetical optimism, I prefer to start from a pessimistic assessment in
order to then look at the unmistakably existing rays of light and proceed
from there. The most important point being to see whether and how such
occurrences and initiatives can be extrapolated to larger dimensions so as
to be able to cause real changes.

So – to be continued!

Hack the State:
(original texts at: http://www.hackthestate.org)
http://statehacks.org/
http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English

The State Hacks Us:

http://data.gov.uk/
http://rewiredstate.org/
http://amsterdamopent.nl

etc.

========================

Appendix 3. Second interim/ preliminary report on my ‘Hacking Society’ project. Friday, March 19, 2010

My Net-enquiries during this week have unearthed quite some more relevant
documentation, a majority of which is not unexpectedly, of the ‘The
State’s Hacking Us’ variety. But there is also an interesting ‘minority
report’

But first it may be helpfull to provide for some more general background,
i.e. to briefly dwell on the current political and economic context. This
because I think the Hacking the State (HtS) and ‘the State’s Hacking Us’
(tSHU) issues cannot and should not be dissociated from the ongoing
‘financial’ crisis – which at the last reckoning appears not to recede,
but on the contrary to rebound even deeper. This will be the moment that
the relatively begnign concept of ‘governance’ (conducted, among other
things, by way of, e.g. ‘crowdsourcing’ – or tSHU) morphs into far less
innocuous ‘crisis management’, the predicted endgame of which might well
be an already theorecised ‘low intensity civil war’(*).

Suffice to say, without entering into ‘French Theory’ at this point, that
this aspect needs to be taken into serious consideration when discussing
ways of ‘making the State work for us instead of the other way round’, or
with other words, that our knowledge of the functioning of the state
apparatus and our development of tools to be on par with it, must address
both relativelty amiable issues (eg those concerning education, health,
housing, transport etc. etc.) and considerably less amiable ones
(regarding ‘law and order’ in its widest acceptation)

This being stated, it will come as no surprise that, at least the more
sophisticated tSHU initiatives are mainly directed at creating information
and ideas exchange platforms bridging governments and citizens (some more
jejune ones hope to enlist citizens as police auxiliaries to
prevent/combat crime and terrorism – they are not necessarily the less
popular or succesful ones…). Such initiatives follow the logic of
externalisation, but are also bolstered by the prevalent ideology of
depolitisation and of running the government as if it were a business,
with citizens as customers – or colaborators.

In the UK, the work of former cabinet minister Tom Watson MP appears to go
in that direction with his ‘Power of Information Taskforce’. This is also
the case with initiatives such as those deployed by UK Citizens Online
Democracy, the backers of the MySociety.org website, allegedly “running
most of the UK’s best known democracy websites”. The list of their
projects itself says a lot about the issues they are concerned with (and
also which ones they are not): * TheyWorkForYou; * No. 10 Petitions; *
WriteToThem; * WhatDoTheyKnow; * PledgeBank; * Travel Time Maps; *
FixMyStreet; and * HearFromYourMP. Alike initiatives also exist in other
European countries, eg the ‘Rathenau Institute for Public and Politics’
and the German ‘Federal Center for political education’ (BPB).

It is also important to notice at this juncture that tSHU ventures maybe
run by the government itself (Rewired State being my favourite peeve, and
the German BPB the nearest thing to what a government should do), but many
if not most are autonomous, ‘civil society’ organisations whose mission
statements (if not truly held beliefs) are about fostering a harmonious
and mutually beneficial relationship between governing and governed. This
does not make the task of critically apraising their activities any easier
and might actually be part of their raison d’etre (as they usually enjoy
generous funding from local, national, or even european governmental
bodies).

To end on an optimistic note, there are fortunately also organisations and
project that support foursquare the interests of citizens rather than
those of the state (whether or not obscured behind a rethoric of ’society
at large’). I already mentioned the BPB, which embodies the official
preoccupation in Germany to never repeat the crimes of dictatorship. But
one should mention also FoeBud, a German citizens initiative extremely
active – and effective – in deconstructing attempts by authorities to
digitally subvert society. In the UK, the Open Rights Group is keen to
protect “your rights in the digital age”, in the Netherlamnds we have
‘Bits of Freedom’ and so are 25 other digital and civil rights
organisations in Europe which are part of the EDRI (European Digital
Rights) federation, itself largely modelled on the American (USA)
Electronic Frontier Foundation.

It should be noted, however, that all these groups are (i) mostly, if not
exclusively, focused on ‘digital’ issues; and that (ii) they almost all
are more reactive than pro-active in their endeavours, monitoring
government and corporate moves, starting campaigns of protests and
sometimes going to court. They have, afaik, not yet engaged in projects
that would concretely ‘empower’ their constituency viz thoses forces that
define their livelihood circumstances. Concurrently, official, or
officially supported, initiatives have stayed clear of matters with clear
political implications, especially those that would entail, or merely
highlight, the issue of power sharing.

So the interim conclusion is that I have yet to scratch beyond the surface
of the real concern at stake here: Hacking the state so as to make the
state work for us in all aspects, if not of life, then at least of
governance. I hope to advance a bit further next week!

This week’s harvest of websites:

More like Hack the State (HtS):
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/
http://www.eff.org (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
https://www.bof.nl/ (Bits of Freedom, Netherlands – in Dutch)
http://www.foebud.org (FoeBuD, Germany – in German)

In Between:
http://www.bpb.de (Bundeszentrale fuer politische Bildung, Germany – in
German)
http://www.publiek-politiek.nl/English (Rathenau Institute “for Political
Participation”)

More like the State’s Hacking Us (tSHU)
http://www.mysociety.org/ – and associated sites
http://www.ukcod.org.uk (UK Citizens Online Democracy, its mother lode)
http://powerofinformation.wordpress.com/about/

Straight tSHU:
http://rewiredstate.org/

Tom Watson’s MP website:
http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/

(*) The French urbanist Jean-Pierre Garnier has a fairly encompassing,
coherent theory about Western governments’ apprehensions regarding the
future and their probable, because already discernible, responses to them:
http://blog.agone.org/category/La-chronique-de-Jean-Pierre-Garnier
(in French)

==========================================================================

Beta Text for the Public Event (March 27 at Access Space), sent to the
panelists and registered participants.

Beta Version of general text for Saturday.

Today is the Public Day and also the last day of my ‘artist-in-residency’
at Access Space. I hope we’ll have all together a lively and interesting
discussion.

The original designation under which I applied for this residency was
called “Hacking Society”, and the issues I wanted to look at were tagged
under the theme “Hack the State”.

The idea was to look into ways citizen could gather sufficient knowledge
about the working of the state apparatus at all levels so as to be able to
effectively ‘operate’ it so that the state would serve us instead of the
other way round.

Now that both society at large and the state use information technology
(IT) to a considerable extent, I would naturally look for the larger part
at the ‘digital’ aspect of the interaction between ‘civil society’ and
‘the state’.

There are many instances were this interaction takes place, and I was
particularly inspired by my experience with a citizen group succesfully
overturning electronic voting in the Netherlands – but only after a
protracted and difficult struggle.

But many (digital) initiatives to resolve conflicts or ‘bridge the gap’
between both parties are set in motion, or at least supported – often
lavishly – by the authorities themselves. This led me to the formulation
of a reverse to ‘hacking the state’: ‘the state is hacking us’.

This takes many forms, from relatively innocuous mining for informations
and suggestions under the citizenry, to outright calls for collaborations
in matter of fraud, crime and terrorism fighting. ‘Crowdsourcing’ is
definitely becoming popular in government circles! ‘Externalisation’ and
cost-cuttings is also here the name of the game.

The authorities at all levels, are also becoming very good at enlisting
societal bodies, ‘independent’ experts, and even ‘geeks’ to this effect.
But also the diversity of agencies involved, and the variety of the issues
being addressed, not to speak of the complexity of the interests involved
makes it very difficult to attain a clear, overall picture of what is
going on. And I cannot say I have succeeded in this.

Rather, where I first saw a single issue, and then a continuum of sorts
(between ‘hacking’ and ‘being hacked’) I am now perceiving a rather dense
and foggy cloud of activities taking place, and of possible, and
conflicting, interpretations thereof. Together with a bevy of risks and
threats, but also of opportunities for resistance and appropriation.

As society, we cannot do without some form of governance, i.e. a state.
And probably neither can we as individuals. So what will we do now? I have
no ready solution, but I am sure the age-old slogan still works:

Don’t Panic!
Hack It!

(And let’s do it together)

(I have now a good deal of sites you might be interested to look at. I’ll
clobber them together to-morrow, with some context when deemed necessary)

Cheers for now, patrizio & Diiiinooos!

================================================

Appendix 5. Websites featuring elements of Hack the State/ the State Hacks Us (HtS/ tSHU)

(Sentences between ” ” are lifted as such from the respective website.)

http://www.openrightsgroup.org/

“Founded in 2005 by 1,000 digital activists, the Open Rights Group is the
UK’s leading voice defending freedom of expression, privacy, innovation,
consumer rights and creativity on the internet.”
“We campaign to change public policy whenever citizens’ or consumers’
rights are threatened. We do this by talking to policy-makers and
mobilising our supporters to stop bad laws in the UK and EU.”

http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/

Tom Watson MP’s blog. Tom Watson (Labour, West Bromwich East) is allegedly
one of the few British politicians being clued in about digital culture.
He started:

http://powerofinformation.wordpress.com/about/

whose Terms of Reference are:
“To advise and assist the government on delivering benefit to the public
from new developments in digital media and the use of citizen- and
state-generated information in the UK, including those identified in the
Power of Information.”

http://www.mysociety.org/

MySociety states that it “run(s) most of the UK’s best known democracy
websites”.

its goals are:
“mySociety has two missions. The first is to be a charitable project which
builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic
and community aspects of their lives. The second is to teach the public
and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to use the internet most
efficiently to improve lives.”

MySociety hosts for instance:

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/

“Keeping tabs on the UK’s parliaments and assemblies”

MySociety itself is part of  a Charity:

http://www.ukcod.org.uk/ UK Citizens Online Democracy

Linked to MySociety and UKCOD is also:

http://www.commentonthis.com/

“an experimental site designed to make it easier to have detailed
discussions around the contents of major public documents, such the Iraq
Survey Group report (or just stuff that would benefit from a bit of
transparency). ”

https://www.bof.nl/

“Bits of Freedom (BoF) is the Dutch digital rights organization, focusing
on privacy and communications freedom in the digital age. Bits of Freedom
strives to influence legislation and self-regulation, on a national and
also on a European level. Bits of Freedom is one of the founders and a
member of European Digital Rights (EDRi).”

http://www.publiek-politiek.nl/English

The (Dutch) Institute for Public and Politics, aka ‘Rathenau Institute’
“is an independent, non-partisan organisation that promotes political and
social participation both in the Netherlands and abroad.”
It is quite active in the digital domain, and is mostly funded by
government agencies.

http://www.bpb.de/

The Federal Agency for Civic Education is part of the German government:
“The work done by the Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale
für politische Bildung/bpb) centres on promoting awareness for democracy
and participation in politics.”
Its raison d’etre is grounded on a (the?) basic principle of post-WWII
German politics:  ”Considering Germany’s experience with various forms of
dictatorial rule down through its history, the Federal Republic of Germany
bears a unique responsibility for firmly anchoring values such as
democracy, pluralism and tolerance in people’s minds.”

(Site mostly in German, but the ‘international page’ is here:
http://bit.ly/94MzFV)

http://www.foebud.org/

FoeBud is the citizens organisation for digital rights, it “has been
working since 1987 for the defense of civili liberties and the protection
of citizens’ data. Diverse people coem together within FoeBud in order to
critically research technology and politics and to shaping these in a
human way”
(my translation, the site is entirely in German)

http://rewiredstate.org/

Rewired State has “Geeks Meet Government” as motto, or alternatively
“Connecting Geek and Government”. Practically speaking: “Rewired State
runs hackdays where developers show government what is possible, and
government shows developers what is needed.”

http://www.edri.org/

EDRI, the European Digital Rights Initiative has 27 affiliated privacy and
civil rights organizations which “have joined forces to defend civil
rights in the information society” at the EU level, “as more regulation
regarding the internet, copyright and privacy is originating from European
institutions, or from International institutions with strong impact in
Europe.”

http://www.coadec.com/

Coadec, the Coalition for A Digital Economy, launched in December 2009,
“is a new entity being launched today to support the creation of a
lasting, sustainable and innovative Digital Economy for British
businesses.”

http://bricolabs.net/politics/zero-dollar-laptop

The Zero Dollar Laptop is a Free Software based project centered on
recycling discarded laptops for useful community and individual learning
and empowerment purposes.

http://participator.zelena-istra.hr/bin/view/Participator

Participator is a project run by the environmental association ‘Green
Istria’ (Pula, Croatia) that is apparently aiming to foster active
political participation (instead of mere consumption) by the citizenry -
more I can’t say, it’s all in Croatian

http://www.networked-politics.info/ together with
http://www.onlinecreation.info/

Are two sites run by Mayo Fuster i Morell, a PhD student with the European
University Institute in Florence (Italy), whose thesis is about ‘Online
communities governance’ The first site (Networked Politics) is “a
collaborative research on new forms of political organization”, whereas
the second, while documenting the progress of her research, contains quite
a lot of useful links and resources.

http://data.gov.uk/

Is a HM government (UK) site  which “seeks to give a way into the wealth
of government data and is under constant development.”
‘Elevator pitch’:
“We’re very aware that there are more people like you outside of
government who have the skills and abilities to make wonderful things out
of public data. These are our first steps in building a collaborative
relationship with you.”

http://www.hackdeoverheid.nl/

“Hack the Government” is a Dutch site whose aims and constituency appears
closely related to ‘Rewired State’: Geeks liaising with the government
(and v.v.) to ‘make things better’. It also includes (very Dutch style)
journalists and other ’significant’ (or ‘expert’) members of the general
public

http://www.demos.co.uk/

Demos is possibly the strangest animal in the collection (immo). Behind
the rhethorics of being “a think-tank focused on power and politics. We
search for and communicate ideas to give people more power to shape their
own lives. Demos’ vision is a democracy of free citizens, with an equal
stake in society” lays a “Progressive Conservatism Project” since
“Conservative means can serve progressive ends”.
Full pitch:
“The Progressive Conservatism Project is a new Demos initiative that
explores how radical conservative philosophy, politics, and policy can
serve truly progressive goals. Since its inception in January 2009, the
Project has established itself as the leading centre of cutting-edge
conservative thinking in the UK, influencing policy-makers and politicians
across the political spectrum with ideas that are independent, rigorous
and radical.”

==============================================

[hide] 1 Ideas Can Not Be Free 2 Intellectual Property and History of Domination 3 Brotherhood of Ideologies OR Lessig’s Creative History 4 Piracy: Blood Crystallized as Diamonds 5 A Glance at the MPAA Propaganda 6 Copyright and the Rise of Users-publishers 7 In a Metapolitical Way: Freeing the Free Software 8 The Diamond Sea 9 Bibliography 10 Footnotes

Technology and organization are political ingredients of society that are often seen in separation, both from each other and from politics and philosophy. Texts below are a collection of work in progress that analyse and demonstrate why they cannot be seen in isolation: what are political consequences from seeing them in isolation and what political [...]]]>

Technology and organization are political ingredients of society that are often seen in separation, both from each other and from politics and philosophy. Texts below are a collection of work in progress that analyse and demonstrate why they cannot be seen in isolation: what are political consequences from seeing them in isolation and what political opportunities open up from considering them together. The concept of techorg is inspired by reading David Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital, where he frequently repeats technology+organization in a way which makes tons of sense to me, for now. It’s there to put a collection of texts under a concept, and the term might morph or disappear as the work develops.

Techorg = technology + organization + politics(philosophy).

- Hacking ideologies: Open Source, a capitalist movement (December 2007)

- Series on Commu(o)nism: Open Process, the organizational spirit … pt 1 (v0.5.2) (2009/10)

- Series on Commu(o)nism: Open Process, the organizational spirit … pt 2 (v0.5.2) (2009/10)

- Open-process Academic Publishing (v1.2) (July-November 2009)

- Free Software (August 2007)

- Why Open and Note Free? (April 2008)

[hide] 1 What is Re-interpretation of FS by Open Source ? ]]>

Writen as a 24c3 (24th Chaos Communication Congress, Volldampf voraus!) event proposal. Based on unpublished dissertation “Free Software”, Aug 2007.

————————————————————————
Believe. “The World is Yours.” (Ian Brown, 2007)
————————————————————————

The Open Source initiative re-interpreted Free Software to include it into the
neo-liberal ideology and the capitalist economy – whose aims are contrary to
the FS starting axioms/freedoms. This platform will focus on ideological
and political aspects of this. It will also suggest FS recovery strategies.

======

What is Re-interpretation of FS by Open Source ?

In The Revenge of the Hackers, Eric Raymond talks about Open Source
goals in clear terms:

“Our success after Netscape would depend on replacing the negative FSF
stereotypes with positive stereotypes of our own–pragmatic tales,
sweet to managers’ and investors’ ears, of higher reliability and
lower cost and better features. In conventional marketing terms, our
job was to re-brand the product, and build its reputation into one the
corporate world would hasten to buy.”

======

The move of the Open Source initiative to bring Free Software
closer to capitalism shows that:

a) there is a gap between the Free Software movement and capitalism;

b) without a significant institutional intervention and
re-interpretation that gap can not be overcome;

c) it is the founding documents (practice of Open Source doesn’t differ),
ethics that Richard Stallman stands by so fiercely, that are
the bite that capitalism can not subsume, swallow in its original form.

======

O’Reilly role: conferences, books, lobbying.

Here’s some neo-liberal text-book propaganda:

“standardization, and thus commodification, are both natural market
forces as well as key events in human history”.

Ian Murdoch, founder of Debianin “Open Source and the
Commoditization of Software” (O’Reilly)

======

Multitude misunderstood – time for education

Lack of understanding of the difference between Open Source and Free
Software is best seen when in one of the masterpieces of recent social
theory (Hardt/Negri’s “Multitude”) term “open-source” was referenced
with the “Free as in Freedom” book on Stallman.

======

Freedom is Politics

Badiou/Zizek: politics is not parliaments, debates compromises,
voting. On the contrary, it is subjectively, militantly, unilaterally,
deciding what seems impossible at the time of the decision.

Actually existing freedom is to choose outside of the given coordinates
in which choice takes place. It is to re-configure the conditions, to
change the scope of “possible outcomes”.

This is the difference between Lenin’s concept of freedom and the liberal,
parliamentary, formal freedom, which consists in participating in the
what is already given, already structured. (Zizek, “On Belief”)

=======

Truth of RMS (Badiou)

Could we not say that this is precisely what Richard Stallman did with
his choice of leaving the job he had at the MIT Lab to devote all his
time to re-create the world of software, from scratch, with an
entirely new set of co-ordinates?

Respect or disrespect the printer licence? Neither! Free Software instead.

Badiou: acting in follow up to an event — event that prompts our
reaction/decision — and pursuing the truth of it through fidelity to
it, through fidelity to the retroactively constructed event that
changes us.

======

Paradox/Subject: axioms-openness, a missing link

One might rightly assume that in the sphere of rational tasks knowledge
and science would be the decisive spheres. Yet, some issues can not be
settled that way.

No science is pure, cleansed of ideology.
Think maths. Axioms – Not to be questioned.
Does that make maths dogmatic? Of course not.
Sciences rely on axiomatic foundations.

ONE: Free Software relies on the set of principles called freedoms.
These are axioms. Not up for discussion.

TWO: Free Software communities function through open participation.
Its progress is through ongoing collaborative production and critique.

Stallman’s truth (printer event + fidelity) stands in the sharp contrast,
indeed in total opposition, to the attributes of the movement he founded.

Openness and collaboration flourished from closed starting points,
from axioms. This is what i call The Paradox of a becoming Subject.

======

GNU manifesto applied: punishment for capitalists?

food, shelter, health, education, labour

from GNU manifesto:
“Don’t programmers deserve a reward for their creativity? If anything
deserves a reward, it is social contribution. Creativity can be a
social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the
results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative
programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they
restrict the use of these programs.”

Consider applying this to the economy. What would it mean to assert
that economic productivity can be a social contribution only if its
results can be shared? It is already shared, many would say: one gets
a salary for one’s work. This would not satisfy FS criteria. If we
narrow down the concept of economic productivity to food, shelter,
health, education – conclusion could be that capitalists restrict use
of the above elements by subverting them into closed, private wealth
generation schemes. And hence, deserve punishment.

======

Inbuilt obsolescence – will they expire us one day,
on the retirement day?

from GNU manifesto:
“Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of
it is destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the
ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth
that humanity derives from the program. When there is a deliberate
choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction.”

Consider inbuilt obsolescence – a capitalist invention whereby products are
designed to fail in order for the development of new products to be
justified by demand created by the inbuilt timed failure of the old ones.

======

AIDS/malaria today: Parliamentary Capitalist Ethics of Death

First, why parliamentary?
Because, as a supreme body, parliaments have the power to stop this.
Yet, they don’t. The actively encourage and protect it.

Given today’s drugs, AIDS could be contained worldwide in relatively
short period of time, but corporations, governments (and the catholic
church) stand in the way of dying millions being protected (Alain
Badiou, “Century”, 2007).

The production of drugs could follow the example of Free Software, be
created in a more collaborative way, publishing recipes and allowing
it to be freely produced, by anyone, for any purpose.

When ethics and its laws allow death on such scale to occur, although
the society has the means to prevent it, we have to ask: what is the
difference between tens of millions dead in two world wars and the
dead of malaria and AIDS today? The former were killed while later are
let to die – by the ethics of death.

=======

Patents, Copyright, Mass Death

Hacking needs access to what it hacks on, and it needs sharing to grow
the knowledge of how it operates. Parliamentary Capitalist law aims to
limit access. Such law is opposed to the ethics of hacking.

Sharing of drug recipes for the prevention of deadly epidemics is explicitly
and deliberately forbidden by the parliamentary capitalist law.

No humans, let alone hackers, should support such law.
Patents and copyright belong to the same ethics.
One that allows millions of AIDS and malaria deaths, annually.

======

Open Source is a neo-liberal, parliamentary capitalist social movement.

Neo-liberalism claims they’re “just doing it” for the sake of a better
economy, without any ideological beliefs. As if any economy, or any act,
was possible without decisions determined by a set of ideas and beliefs.

This is why Nike’s slogan “just do it”
is the best summary of the capitalist ideology ever.

And this is why “Open source is a development methodology;
free software is a social movement” (Stallman), misses the crucial point.

Open Source is not just a development methodology, but a social
movement too, a social movement of a different kind, with different,
parliamentary capitalist, goals.

Another problem lies in the claims that Open Source separates ethics from the
technical side of Free Software (Stallman, “Why ‘Open Source’ misses
the point about Free Software”), thus making it acceptable to corporations.

This implies two wrong statements about Open Source:

a) it has no ethics of its own;

b) there are purely technical solutions which can be used without
any ethical, political, or ideological commitments.

The result of these mistakes is widespread comparison of Free
Software and Open Source on false, crucially misleading terms:

- one (FS) operating under the weight and demand of its ethics;

- the other (OS) getting away without being examined at all, basking in
the purity of its technical attributes and various business-friendly tags

This is how the ethics, the ideology and, indeed, the politics of Open Source
slip through unexamined and unchallenged — like the capitalist ideologies
whose key strategy has historically been to accuse any political opponents
of ethical commitments, while insisting on their own “pragmatism” and
on the purely technical aspect of “just getting things done”.

======

Finally … piracy? WHAT PIRACY?

Parliamentary capitalism (in its propaganda materials also known
as liberal democracy) is based on the idea that majority should
determine, via its representatives, how a state is governed and
an economy run. Cisco tells us in their marketing materials that vast
majority of the Internet traffic today is p2p traffic. If vast majority of
users practice p2p and disregard law, should not then, by the
capitalist parliamentary logic of majority rule, law be changed,
since that is what majority wants?

Parliaments and representatives act to prevent us from having laws
that will act on our behalf, regardless of our position of minority,
or majority – the logic by which they operate is different, it is
the logic of capital.

The hacks we desperately need are in the realm of thoughts – We need
to change our thinking about the law and its relations to politics,
while continuing expansion of p2p technologies and techniques.
If more hacking of ideas/thoughts was discussed and encouraged,
we would soon render discussions on piracy/laws/illegal/legal
obsolete. Instead, we would focus on what political and economic
structures do we want, to protect whom, to encourage what?
And how do we do it.

=======
————————————————————————
Believe. “The World is Yours.” (Ian Brown, 2007)
————————————————————————

The History of Financial Violence and The Directly Democratic Response (hrvatski prijevod)

In the twenty years since the nationalist takeover of state power in Croatia, the idea of collective good, beyond its mandatory and narrow identification with the nation, has  been absent from public discourse. In those rare moments when it appeared [...]]]>

The History of Financial Violence and The Directly Democratic Response (hrvatski prijevod)

In the twenty years since the nationalist takeover of state power in Croatia, the idea of collective good, beyond its mandatory and narrow identification with the nation, has  been absent from public discourse. In those rare moments when it appeared on the margins of public life, evoking the economic aspects of the collective, the state and media were successful in containing it, narrowing it down, rephrasing it ideologically, and preventing it from spreading in undesired forms [1]. For the previous forty five years, Croatian citizens have enjoyed the benefits of free education and health care. Even the most efficient ideological engine, the liberal parliamentary capitalist one, could not erase that over night. As less and less remains in the carcasses of industries to be ripped apart and stolen from the people (in Yugoslavian socialism, they were formally owned by the people, not the state, see Branko Horvat), the capitalist vultures turned to one of the remaining mainstays of the 45-year socialist project: free education and health.  Their problem this time was that they found a formidable opponent.

The privatization of education has been introduced gradually – most likely in the hope that no one would notice. Not this time.

Two large student occupations at the faculty of Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, one in spring 2009 (lasting for thirty-five days) and one in the autumn (lasting for fourteen days), were executed through a series of strategic moves. Taking control over faculties spread in several cities and the network of students that came out of it still actively developing. From the single, simple, and yet powerful demand, ‘free publicly financed education on all levels available to all’,  through strategic openness, discipline in organization, refusal of negotiations, different anonymous students reading announcements for media each time, no spokepersons or leaders (making personalized attacks by the state and media impossible), fury of constant activity on theory, translations and publishing, theoretical reading groups, linkup and support for rebelling workers and peasant; constant documentation of the work they do; creation of 70 page long The Occupation Cookbook [2] and Workers-Peasants FAQ (frequently asked questions) printed and distributed to occupied factories. Through all this students have stunned the state-capitalist machinery and pushed it on the back foot. Consequently it has been forced to defend and in many cases in publicly discuss what has thus far been a standard process of the Croatian political-economic life: uncritical implementation of the worst aspects of the neoliberal doctrine [3]. This was by no means the usual ‘we don’t like neoliberal educational reforms’ chant from the Left supplanted by student activism, but a constantly theorized and developed, coordinated attack on the ideological foundations of capitalism in Croatia and its parliamentary undemocratic form, through which the enormous amount of socially distributed wealth produced in Croatia under socialism has been first destroyed, then stolen under the premise of dysfunctionality.

Unusually, only regular classes were blocked – the administration, the library, the bookshop and other facilities within the faculty building were allowed to function as usual. Radically open plenums (plenary assemblies), ‘at which all decisions were made concerning the functioning of the occupied faculty’ were open for participation and voting to everyone who turned up, and not just to students. Code of conduct spells out the details of respectful behavior, student guards and their role, care for property, passive resistance if the police turns up, and many other details [4]. Most important is their directly democratic aspect:

The plenum cannot at any time elect a representative that can make decisions or agree to certain terms on his/her own. The plenum can only elect delegates which communicate the decisions and the will of the plenum, as well as pass back offers and questions to be considered by the plenum. This method of electing delegates, which is the only truly democratic way, excludes the possibility of manipulating individual representatives.

Viktor Ivančić, co-founder of Feral, the long-standing and best critical political journal of the past twenty years, and the sharpest political commentator, puts it succinctly:

Depersonalizing their public appearances, organizing student plenums (plenary open to all citizens) daily, rejecting selecting of the delegates or charismatic leaders, refusing negotiation scuffles and tradings, girls and boys from the Faculty of Philosophy have unmasked the lie of the so called representative democracy, which is, after passing through party and interparty machines, manifested as an  authoritarian model. [5]

Ivančić’s thinking cuts to the bone: not only have the students demonstrated, for almost a year, the possibility of a new model of participatory, inclusive direct democracy in practice, but they keep showing the extent to which capitalist parliamentary model is corrupt, undemocratic, and directly against the interest of everyone but a tiny minority. A central argument students bring to the fore, which cancels the core tenet – financial independence based on managing its own resources – of the nationalist state project to a large extent, is that by entering the EU the national state is signing away wide range of rights and benefits that the vast majority of citizens had in abundance under (international) Yugoslav socialism.

Financial violence

The rosy picture that neoliberal revolutionaries have painted for the past thirty years, which directly and violently shaped the fortunes of both Yugoslavia and Croatia, has perished with the financial crashes of 2008. The logic is almost painfully simple: had not the state intervened in the markets with huge amounts of money, effectively nationalizing large parts of the financial sector, it would have collapsed.  In an interview in summer 2009, Alistair Darling, the UK financial minister, admitted: on the most critical weekend in the 2008, UK was hours away from the two of the four largest banking shutting their cash machines on Monday morning [6][7]. Not once have i seen this point brought up in terms of its possible consequences. Once two out of four largest banks stopped giving the cash out, I doubt the ensuing events would have been peaceful.

This is a scenario that was a significant factor in the breakup of Yugoslavia, and in the social disorders and wars in other states subject to neoliberal violence: physical violence is preceded by financial violence.  The conditions imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) upon Yugoslavia in the early 1980s in order that it pay back its debt gave rise to nationalist groups, and eventually assisted them in claiming their stake on the power, transforming their nationalism opportunistically into an anti-socialist project. The Yugoslav state was unable to withstand financial violence: it fell apart in the war lead by nationalists seizing the moment of crisis, exploiting the long period of citizens had to queue for basic foods like milk and bread, resulting from the Yugoslav leadership’s failure to defend from IMF pressure.  In the early 2000s, after a decade of systemic destruction and theft of the state economy by the Croatian government and its criminal accomplices, Croatia sold off its entire banking system, earning the praise of the EU for privatization, for ‘liberalizing’ over 94 per cent of the financial sector [8]. Croatia thus repeated the Yugoslav socialists’ mistake from 1980s: failing to defend itself from imperialist financial attacks, it thereby weakened itself drastically, narrowing the possibilities for state intervention in a time of crisis. Although the decisions made by Rohatinski, the governor of Croatia’s National Bank, can be seen as proof that the Croatian state still has mechanisms of internal economic protection from external financial upheaval, the worst economically is yet to come for Croatia.

A recent report compiled by the Austrian National Bank paints a depressing picture of rapidly growing debt and declining production [9]. Croatian foreign debt was around €10 billion in 2000; at the end of 2009 it was over €42 billion, close to 100 per cent of GDP. To demonstrate how cheaply the banking was sold off:  Splitska Banka, Croatian third biggest bank, was evaluated at €150 million at the time of its sale to first private owners in 2000. When the bank was sold to its current owner for €1 billion in 2006, its assets were estimated at €3.2 billion [10:66]. Between 1993 and 2002, around 75 percent of foreign investment was ‘related to privatisation projects, mainly in the banking, telecommunications and pharmaceutical sector’ [8:40]. In other words, it was not investment, but a sell-off of massively undervalued assets built up during socialism.  To make it worse, banking was cleared of bad debt prior to sale, ‘restructured and  consolidated’ at ‘high costs’ of €5.6 billion [8:42] (€15 billion according to debates in Croatian parliament), far outstripping the price banks were sold for. ‘Privatization’ was a series of criminal acts of state leaders.

This history of financial violence, imposed from outside, but accepted and executed internally, is the story of a repeated mistake – the 1980s in Yugoslavia, the 2000s in Croatia – with no lessons learnt by the ruling political elites, so far.  A correct way to be truthful to students occupations in Croatia is to speak up against this violence, against neo-liberalism, imperialism and capitalism, and for new egalitarian political projects, based not any more on the twentieth century militaristic hierarchical and representative models (the political party, parliament, the unions), but on directly democratic models of political organization, starting in the workplace.

Few peoples of the world have more to say on this topic, having witnessed its failure and learnt from it, then the people of ex-Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia’s self-management was a bold yet failed effort whose theoretical re-evaluation is overdue. The technologies for self-management and direct democracy did not exist at the time to make such participative model efficient, or open, or transparent or accountable to its egalitarian political subjects and to the society at large.  The actions of Croatian students show that the means of communication and organization (as well as the means of production of discourses and organizations) we have at our disposal today allow for a new, directly democratic set of organizational structures and processes – blogs, email lists, plenary sessions, working groups, all used without representative bodies. However, for their utilization to be effective, many strategic political decisions, informed by the application of theory to the concrete situation in which intervention occurs, have to be made, and, most importantly, carried out with discipline.

One of the most active working groups, and perhaps the most important one in terms of the political aspect of the student occupations, is one for ‘spreading ideas and establishing the practice of direct democracy’. Its primary tasks so far have been taking part in writing, printing and distribution of the Workers-Peasants FAQ, in visiting worker-occupied factories and strikes, and holding lectures in high schools on direct democracy.

Work of all involved in this student initiative made representative student bodies looking like a relic of history. Simultaneously, the neoliberal capitalist ripping of Croatia has been brought – by student’s highly intelligent, disciplined and strongly theoretically founded actions and strategic decisions – into the public discourse, something hardly imaginable in 2008.

Not only do rebelling Croatian students deserve our unconditional support and comradely critique; it will be a missed opportunity for the left anti-capitalist struggle if their work is not assisted, studied and reapplied appropriately to other contexts. One of the founding approaches of many martial arts disciplines is to utilize the force in the field of struggle: a force directed against us is often best not confronted frontally, but better undermined by being contained and redirected against political enemies. Badiou, Negri and Žižek insist that the idea of communism needs to be thought anew, outside of the worn-out  forms of the party and the unions. Students in Croatia have demonstrated how it ought to be: bold, directly democratic and strategically open.

References:
1.    Ćurković S. Tranzicija i solidarnost [Internet]. H-Alter. 2009 Oct 13 [cited 2010 May 3];Available from: http://www.h-alter.org/vijesti/ljudska-prava/tranzicija-i-solidarnost

2.    Free Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. The Occupation Cookbook [Internet]. 2010 [cited 2010 May 3];Available from: http://slobodnifilozofski.org/?p=1901

3.    Free Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. About the independent student initiative for the right to free education [Internet]. 2010 [cited 2010 May 3];Available from: http://slobodnifilozofski.org/?page_id=2

4.    Free Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. The Occupation Cookbook: CODE OF CONDUCT DURING THE STUDENT CONTROL OF THE FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES [Internet]. 2010 [cited 2010 May 3];Available from: http://slobodnifilozofski.org/?p=1915/#28

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[hide] 1 Introduction 2 Hackers and the Protestant ethics 2.1 Talk is cheap, show me the code (sola code) 2.2 Against memory 3 Free Software, politics and ideology 3.1 PeerToPeer and Free Drugs democracy 4 Revolutionary justice 5 Hacking the regime of equal rights 6 Free Software and academia 7 Conclusions 8 Bibliography 9 Footnotes

Introduction

“Civilization has reached every part of the world and the North has realised [...]]]>

Introduction

“Civilization has reached every part of the world and the North has realised it cannot conquer by restricting access to factors of production through waging war; the best method to maintain the status quo is by denying the South access to the most important factor which without it all others are derailed; this factor is information. Thus they have introduced the concept of International Copyright Law.” World Social Forum, Nairobi, Wakasa and Gitau (2007)

As a young hacker, computer programmer at MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, Richard Stallman fixed annoying problems with the donated printer. When he requested source code for the printer, which was a common practice at the time, his request was refused (Williams, 2002: 4-12). What was until then common, and what hackers believed served progress in the quality of science and engineering – sharing of software code – was closed down, enclosed by the company that developed it. Free Software (Stallman, 2002: 41) was born out of refusal of a single man to submit to the logic of enclosure of wealth in the intellectual sphere. The set of principles Richard Stallman stood for ended up embodied in the General Public Licence (p.195). The body of intellectual wealth released under such licence has been in expansion since. Vast majority of all the existing websites on the Internet are operated using Free Software². What is the importance of all this for sociology? Why is Free Software social phenomena worth studying?

To start with, the mode of production of Free Software differs from the modes used in all modern economies and states, whether capitalist or socialist. The main differences are voluntary participation, organization of work, and relation to property – software should not have owners (p.45). Production that occurs without any form of coercion is rare in modern industrial society. Voluntary production whose final product ends up running large parts of today’s entire communication and electronic computing has to be a unique phenomenon in modern history. Production of Free Software was not profit driven at first, nor directly financed. Yet, it spread worldwide and influenced the way world is today³. Key theoretical problems this research will investigate are related to hacker ethics, Free Software and allocation/distribution of wealth in society. I will show how the use of Max Weber’s work to theorize Free Software can lead us to conclude that, contrary to what many other authors claimed, spirit of hackers has a lot more similarities with the Protestantism, than the capitalism itself. Through the work of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, I will argue for a reading of Free Software as a political act, act whose consequences can be far reaching if we applied it – especially its axiomatic approach to decommodification (Stallman, 2007b) – to any other science and arts that can be stored and shared digitally. Reading Ranciere, I will argue that acts of peer-to-peer networks, sharing of millions of people worldwide can be read as a re-conceptualization of democracy. Finally, I will ask why are we, the rich North countries, especially Europe where most of the drugs research comes from public funds, not using the example of Free Software to act ethically when it comes to deadly epidemics of malaria and AIDS in parts of the world.

Hackers and the Protestant ethics

For Himanen (2001), it is the hacker ethics that drives the development of Free Software. Hacker⁴ not meaning just a computer specialist of certain type, but any person who practices some of the hacker ethics. It was Levy (1984) who first formulated main point of hackers ethics as: a) access to computers (and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works) should be unlimited and a total, hands-on approach is imperative; b) all information should be free; c) mistrust authority and promote decentralization; d) hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race or position; e) you can create art and beauty on a computer; f) computers can change your life for the better⁵.

Hackers are inclined to become obsessed with their work. They pursue it relentlessly, often at the expense of other aspects of life. Because of this, they have been portrayed as anti-social, weird in ways which “normal” human beings cannot understand. Yet, their work differs significantly from what we consider today to be a dominant paradigm of capitalist society, the Protestant work ethic. According to Himanen, it is social motivations that separate those two ethics: in the Protestant ethic work has invaded leisure and aspects of private life, like finding a spouse and having friends, are frequently carried out work. Those social activities at work serve in the Protestant ethic to distract attention from the idea that pursuing one’s passion should happen at work too (Himanen,2001: 51). Although for hackers what they do (but not necessary the employment) is passion, why would people in such large numbers work in their leisure time too just to give the result of their work away in the public domain, for free? The linking of a contribution to society with passion is what for Himanen characterises the hacker ethic a powerful model. Recent empirical research in which 680 Free Software programmers were interviewed concluded that enjoyment is the biggest reason why hackers do what they do (Lakhani and Wolf, 2003). A paradox that remains theoretically unresolved is how can people with such socialization elements (high priority to work, frequent aspects of strange communication with other people) and values of individual freedoms have at the same time such a firm link to the society and what they consider good for it. The company Google understands this well and implements aspects of it in practice by allowing its engineers to spend twenty percent of their time at work working on their own technical projects, not necessarily linked with what company does. For a hacker, “making a living” is a depressive, unbearable option that he replaces with “it’s my life”, as Himanen (2001, 40) correctly observes. The curse of the Protestant ethic of work as necessary suffering that one is obliged to withstand, the iron cage built by our rationality, as Max Weber concluded on the character of this modern lockdown of humanity (Weber,1965: 182), thus, even more paradoxically, gets hacked, reused in unexpected, unintended ways, by the people engaged in one of most rational tasks, computer programming. Is that not what hackers are doing to the computing tools and global communications networks built to a large extent for military and profit making purposes, reusing them in their own way, redefining some of the core postulates of our time: why do we work how we work, what is our relationship with the product of our work and what do we do with the results? The answer to the question “why” is for hackers clear: because it is pleasure, not suffering. How? In collaboration, sharing the results and internals of what is produced, with open access for anyone whose material conditions allow them to observe and engage in what is done. Can hackers have the last laugh, as simultaneous co-creators of the iron-turns-silicon cage and its hackers?

When Max Weber concluded that the Protestant ethic is a driver for he development of capitalism, his main argument focused on an ethic of dedication to work, and, most importantly, of saving the profits, which in turn leads to the investment of accumulated capital. This was one of the key elements how, according to Weber, the capitalist machine got moving. Castells (1996: 200) agrees with Weber and adds that to explain society today, we need to have “some kind of cultural glue” that makes social actors behave in similar fashion on a large scale, and that purely rationalist explanations, for something as large as emergence of capitalism, aren’t enough. There are also recent works (Mikkonen et al., 2007) in which very similar conclusions are drawn, this time from empirical data collected, through interviews and questionnaires, from communities of programmers. The findings reaffirm some findings of Himanen’s Hacker Ethics, most known of all writings in this direction, stating that motives for participation in open source and free software production today are mainly for the material benefit of participants. Yet, Himanen’s research left many questions open and posed hacker ethics as a threat to protestant ethics, while Mikhonnen’s research concludes that some sort of special ethics of hackers is a myth. Overall, these researches agree with Weber’s use of concept of the Protestant ethic as the spirit of capitalism and analyze hackers in relation to it, starting from the hacker ethic as being in opposition to the Protestant ethic, and concluding that reality is lot simpler, since hackers end up joining the forces of capitalism and the Protestant ethic in the end.

None of this was convincing enough for me, starting from Weber’s use of only a few elements of Protestantism, followed by a superficial use of his work in the sociology of hackers during last ten years⁶. They agree with Weber all too quickly, and offer no close reading of Weber’s work, nor of the key concepts (religion, Protestantism, rationality) that made that work possible. Himanen’s work touches upon the kind of reading that I believe is necessary, but it is still playing it far too safe in far too many areas⁷.

I’m tempted to start from the opposite position. For the benefit of his conclusions on Protestantism as the spirit of capitalism, Weber presented Protestantism as a single, unified whole, although he was fully aware that that was not the case⁸. Using Weber’s conclusion presents us with an all too easy to use, yet deceiving, formula. To use it as label, as a quote that one can just attach to one’s work, as Castells and others do in explaining social phenomena of hackers and our computing age, betrays both the complexity and the richness of Weber’s work and of the situation in which we find ourselves today⁹.

Hackers are not a challenge to the Protestant ethic, quite the contrary. I’m tempted to claim they are far more protestant than what capitalism can bare, hence their uneasy fit. Open Source is a movement that, with quite some success, attempted to “pacify” Free Software, to bridge the gap between Free Software and capitalism. Project Oekonux¹⁰ is a good example of an opposite theoretical approach. The move of the Open Source¹¹ initiative to bring Free Software closer to capitalism shows that: a) there is a gap between the Free Software movement and capitalism; b) without a significant institutional intervention and re-interpretation that gap can not be overcome; c) more than practice (since practice of Open Source doesn’t differ that much), it is the founding documents, principles that Richard Stallman stands by so fiercely that are the bite that capitalism can not subsume, swallow in its original form. Re-interpretation work¹² that Open Source¹³, and to a large extent publisher O’Reilly¹⁴, did, was necessary for inclusion of Free Software into capitalist economy. The task that I set for myself is similar to that of the Oekinux project, with a different path of investigation: to conceptualize, give a theoretical form to that which resists capitalism in Free Software. An expression of the hacker ethics needs to be hacked to enable future, social, hacks.

Talk is cheap, show me the code (sola code)

Let us read briefly some of the core features of Protestantism and consider what is it that made me wary of accepting Max Weber’s final conclusions as a useful analytical premise on its own i.e. stripped of the rest of his research. Although these will be formulated as questions for further research – since answering the doubts I’m raising here comprehensively is beyond the scope of this dissertation – it is necessary to deal with them, given the prominence other authors give to Weber’s work when discussing hackers and Free Software.

The core arguments on which Weber built his theses, as Towney summarized so well in his foreword (Weber, 1965), rely on a specific branch of Calvinism, on the writings of English Puritans in late seventeenth century, and it is possible (we don’t know, as yet) that quite a different picture might have emerged had Weber focused on early key Protestants texts, or on any other of the large number of interpretations of those texts and of the practices of various sects of Protestantism. For Weber 1965: 36), the most intriguing question of the sixteenth century, to which he admitted there is no simple answer, is this: why did a large majority of the economically most prosperous parts of Europe, the wealthy towns of the time, convert to Protestantism. The link, he believed, between “emancipation from economic traditionalism” and challenge to the control of the Church over everyday life definitely existed in some form.

Dutch, English and Americans Puritanism was opposed to joy of life, Weber tells us, and it would be a mistake to link this awakening in any way with the Enlightenment, which is, given some its prominent characteristics, a temptation (p.45). In contrast to the life of village, privileged traditionalism was confronted with the rational calculations of capitalism. Protestantism is important for Weber because it formed a stage prior to the development of rationalist philosophy. However, such philosophy had its own track of development and to explain it only in terms of Protestantism would be wrong (p.75). It was the Pietistic branch, whose “enhanced abilities of mental concentration and essential feeling of obligation to one’s job”, combined with self control and economic thinking which calculated possibles of high earning that was a key element, and a paradox, that linked the two, an element that was necessary for the rise of capitalism, and that provided “most favourable foundation for the conception of labour as an end in itself, as a calling that is necessary to capitalism” (p.63). People filled with the capitalist spirit are irrational about their work, since they exist for their business, and not the other way around (p.70). Central to their capitalist life-work was provision of humanity with material goods (p.76). Yet, it is not the extreme rationality in the idea of devotion to labour that is primary interest for Weber, but its irrationality from the position of self-interest based on personal happiness that sits at the centre of his work on spirit of capitalism (p.78). His goal was not to evaluate the ideas of the Reformation in any sense, nor to suggest that capitalism wouldn’t have developed without Protestantism, but to investigate to what extent religious ideas have taken in part in the formation and spread of the capitalist spirit (p.91). The rejection of the Church, and in some cases of all rituals (Puritanism), was for Weber the logical conclusion of religion’s historical tendency to remove magic from the world (p.105). Finally, it was methodical control over one’s emotions, behaviour and time, rejection of joy, dedication to labour, provided by some protestant branches, that formed the spirit that capitalism inherited. The core principles of Protestantism should thus read as something that resembles the spirit of capitalism that we know of today.

The basic theological points of the Reformation are called the Five Solas. The first one, Solus Christus (Christ alone) refuses Pope and church as Christ’s representatives and preaches that Christ, and no one else, mediates between God and man. The second one, Sola scriptura, refuses the need for a Church to interpret the Scripture and the Church’s monopoly on such interpretation. Protestants believe that people should read the Scripture on their own and make up their own minds about it, without external interpretation. The third one, Sola fide, asserts that it is on the basis of faith alone that believers are forgiven. The fourth one, Sola gratia, claims that believers are accepted without any regard for the merit of their work; God decides on his own. The fifth and last one, Soli Deo gloria, preaches glory to God alone, and denies that saints of the Roman Catholic Church, including popes, are worthy of the glory assigned to them.

Not all of this maps to hackers and Free Software. Yet, if we are to speak in terms of spirit like Weber did, in terms of the general mood of the Five Solas, there are striking similarities. Throughout, like hackers and Free Software, the spirit of Protestantism is in favour of direct engagement of individuals, and the proliferation of interpretations and organizations to support these if needed. It arose against the centralization of the Roman Catholic Church, privilege in interpretation of people chosen by the Church, and against the Church’s extraction of wealth from its believers. At that time, those were anti-institutional, anti-hierarchical and anti-bureaucratic principles. Although the high number of branches of Protestantism was criticized by Calvin, principle was withheld in practice. This resembles the hacker’s principle of forking a project: if you don’t like what is someone else doing with some project, you take a copy of the source code¹⁵ and start work on it in the direction you wish. The principle of scripture alone is similar to the hacker’s dedication to the code, the text that makes all software what it is. All doubts about interpretations can be resolved by looking at the source. For all hackers, to dive straight to the source code is not the last resort, but rather the first course of action. Interpretation is personal, direct and engagement with no proxy is in most cases the only right option. Trust in people’s ability to dive straight to the code, to make up their own mind by reading it, to make a critical evaluation, to decide for themselves, are key for hackers. This unmediated contact with the scripture and trust in people is embodied in the Free Software principle of “freedom to study how software works and adapt it to your needs, access to the source code is precondition for this” Stallman (2002).

Aiding capitalism, allowing economic emancipation of individuals was for Weber a side effect of Reformation, not its intended purpose, regardless of its insistence on individual material gains, and its dislike of capitalism, demonstrated by Luther, for example. This paradox is best seen in the quote of John Wesley where it is clear how well Wesley is aware of the paradox (Weber, 1965: 175). Capitalism didn’t follow main principles of Protestantism, it followed some of them, those that suited it. If it had followed Protestantism to a large extent, it wouldn’t be so difficult to fit hackers and Free Software into capitalism. The dark mood in which Weber concludes his book, the last few pages that are misused as a label so often, state the problem more precisely: “Puritans wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so”(p.181). Puritans, not all Protestants.

If there is one important part of the hacker ethics that might go against the Protestantism, it could be its insistence on doing the work as enjoyment and improving the technology so that it can serve humanity and so that humans can be lazy. Two hackers of the highest standing, Larry Wall (inventor of programming language Perl) and Yukihiro Matsumoto Matz (inventor of influential programming language Ruby), both stated it on many occasions: for a true hacker, laziness is a virtue, and computers are there to serve humans. Both of them are very religious, and Matz even served as a missionary for his church. Linus Torvalds, one of the most important hackers today, is known for statements that can be seen as fundamentalist.

Consider this from the Linux coding style guide: “Heretic people all over the world have claimed that this inconsistency is … well .. inconsistent, but all right-thinking people know that a) K&R are _right_ and (b) K&R are right”¹⁶ (K&R are Kernighan and Ritchie, inventors of programming language C). Or, this from one of his interviews: “Which mindset is right? Mine, of course. People who disagree with me are by definition crazy (Until I change my mind, when they can suddenly become upstanding citizens)” (Barr, 2005). Richard Stallman, because of what some considered inflexibility when discussing core premises of Free Software, was seen as a fundamentalist. Debates about preferences to which software, or which programming tool, to use are frequently referred to as religious wars¹⁷.

All of this is left mostly untouched under the framing of business friendly Open Source. This is not a coincidence. Anything that gets included into capitalist economy has to be stripped of any previous attributes and represented as a mere commodity (Zizek, 2006), an entity to be produced, sold and utilized. There are two sets of complexities that are erased in a single move of becoming open source: that of Free Software prior to its inclusion into the capitalist economy, and that of the commodity form itself – base entity of the capitalist economy.

Against memory

For Badiou, 2003: 44), memory became a guardian of historical consciousness, allowing society to re-evaluate its history on the basis of new historical facts and discourses. Yet, there comes a moment, when memory can not settle the issue any more, when a debate, exchange of argument, of proof and counter-proof, has to stop and a decision has to be made, a stance has to be taken. Example Badiou gives us for this is discussion with erudite anti-semites about the holocaust: we will not enter that discussion, we will proclaim the matter settled. In the same way, for Badiou’s exemplary revolutionary, Saint Paul, the resurrection of Christ was not something to be debated, it was “a pure event, opening of an epoch, transformation of the relations between the possible and the impossible” (2003: 45). This is another way to read Richard Stallman’s encounter with the closed source code and broken printer: a pure event, site of decision-making where, as we witness today in the social phenomenon of Free Software, the relationship between the possible and the impossible was transformed. If this transformation was not the case, one would have to argue that the phenomenon of world-wide volunteer collaboration which resulted in of the most powerful software products in the world today, collaboration between professionals, hobbyists, students, would have been possible without the commitments and methodologies of Free Software.

Badiou’s reading of Paul enables us to see another paradox in the founding and development of Free Software, namely, the clash between its founding principles and those through which it developed. Communal sharing (Williams, 2002:85) and open participation in production and openness to criticism, to alternative options, are key development methodologies in Free Software. One of the main reasons for doing it in the first place for Stallman was the pleasure of learning and the ability to see software immediately doing something useful (2002:79). Yet, although that is what marked the beginning of his devotion to the new cause, it was not, and still isn’t, open to debate, discussion, knowledge based evaluation. For Stallman, as for Paul, it was not question of knowledge but a question of the subject, of a subjective path. In Badiou’s words “this is the one and only question, which no protocol of knowledge can help settle” (Badiou, 2003:49). Is this not an accurate description of Stallman’s event and decisions? They certainly are not open: not for participation or collaboration, not for debate or discussion, not for the knowledge. Thus, we can conclude: Stallman’s event and fidelity to it stand in sharp contrast, indeed in total opposition, to the attributes of the movement he founded.

Free Software, politics and ideology

A political act, according to Slavoj Zizek and Alan Badiou is not what we’re used to seeing on daily basis in the liberal parliamentary arena: debates, compromises, voting on issues, forming partnerships for ongoing consultation with communities, and so on. Rather it is quite the opposite: subjectively, militantly, unilaterally, deciding what seems impossible at the time of the decision, acting in follow up to an event, event that prompts our reaction/decision, and pursuing the truth of it through fidelity to it, through fidelity to the event that changes us. For Slavoj Zizek, that is the definition of actual freedom, freedom to choose outside of given options and coordinates of the field in which choice is meant to be made. This is the difference between Zizek’s concept of freedom and liberal, parliamentary, formal freedom, which consists in participating in the what is already given, already structured (Zizek, 2001:115). Could we not say that this is precisely what Richard Stallman did with his choice of leaving the job he had at the MIT Lab to devote all his time to re-create the world of software, from scratch, with an entirely new set of social co-ordinates? One key element that he didn’t envisage, the involvement of others was the unpredictable without which his creation wouldn’t have been possible. His act resembles the definition of utopia that Zizek gave on few occasions, best captured in the electrifying atmosphere of an Argentinian university (Taylor, 2006) where, in front of nearly 2000 attendants, he restated how it is desperation, the lack of any other options, the urge to act, to do something that otherwise might seem totally unreasonable, that defines his notion of utopia. In that sense, Richard Stallman is one of the prominent utopists of our time. When pragmatism and neo-liberal fundamentalism seem to exclude all other options for development of human societies, such utopian acts of desperation are to be celebrated and supported.

Like the Magna Carta, the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, or the Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen, General Public License, the key Free Software document, sets out axiomatic principles: equality for all when it comes to using, modifying and sharing one of the most revolutionary means of production humanity has ever invented: software, the means for automating machines to produce what we instruct them to do.

This is Badiou’s revolutionary economic justice, but in the unexpected sphere of software: “all software should be free and the prospect of charging money for software was a crime against humanity” (2002:85). Would it not make sense to expect this kind of radical stance when it comes basics like shelter, food, health treatment, education? Why are obvious question like these not being discussed, even though Free Software has drawn a great deal of attention? Are the freedoms that Free Software is based on so specific to software that it makes no sense to think whether the same can be demanded and achieved for the above-mentioned basic spheres of material and intellectual life?

When asked whether programmers deserve reward for their creativity, Stallman’s reply was that if anything deserves a reward it is a social contribution. For him, creativity can be a social contribution only if its results can be shared (2002:105). If we applied the same logic to other spheres of life, the consequences for this statement would be far reaching. Consider the economy. What would it mean to assert that economic productivity can be a social contribution only if its results can be shared? It is already shared, many would say: one gets a salary for one’s work. This would hardly satisfy Stallman’s criteria. For Badiou’s Paul, pay can never meet the demand placed on the society by one’s contribution . Pay can only delay the eruption of that demand, I would add.

Badiou warns us through Passolini’s published, but never filmed, script on Paul, how Passolini saw Paul as a revolutionary wishing to destroy a model of society based on social inequality, imperialism and slavery. The Church, a key institution of oppression for dozens of centuries, which in practice worked against Paul’s mission, integrated the milder parts of Paul’s teaching into its own scripture, on the grounds that it was better to have him on their side in some acceptable form, stripped of his radical elements, than to leave him in heresy, free to unleash his teachings in its full radical potential (Badiou, 2003:36).

This is how, today, we can define the freedom of piracy in relation to arts, science and Free Software. These are heretical acts of our times, heretical to the neo-liberal neo-conservative mix of seemingly unstoppable powers that today combine military with the regime of law to occupy a wide range of material, artistic and scientific aspects of life throughout the world.

Today, sharing the wealth of digitally reproducible arts and sciences has become the heretical act of making such wealth more common, of creating the space and culture of more common human action, of exposing the false, imposed logic of scarcity. These acts are fronts which could redefine future political battles, on national, supra-national and global levels. They raise key political issues, issues that have inspired revolutions that framed the idea of emancipated humanity: questions of property and the division between public and private. It us up to us to recognize those questions, to give them forms that are inescapably political, divisive and antagonistic towards the ruling capitalist parliamentary ideology, and act through the rupture that those forms open up, primarily in the hegemonic discourse of private capital. It is worth recalling how Rancière (2004:303) posed one of this key questions and its connection with politics:

”The Declaration of Rights states that all men are born free and equal. Now the question arises: What is the sphere of implementation of these predicates? If you answer, as Arendt does, that it is the sphere of citizenship, the sphere of political life, separated from the sphere of private life, you sort out the problem in advance. The point is, precisely, where do you draw the line separating one life from the other? Politics is about that border. It is the activity that brings it back into question.”

Transfered to the realm of Free Software, it is the declaration of software sharing as a right – known as freedoms 2 and 3 (Stallman, 2005) – that challenges both the question of the border between private and public and that of property. In today’s capitalist order, we are free to use the commodities we acquired, free to do whatever we want with them, to destroy them, give them away, or put them back into circulation as commodities. With electronically storable commodities, like some artistic works, science and all software, commodity users are in the position to multiply those commodities and offer them to others for use easily through networked computers. This introduces a rupture with the functioning of the capitalist economy which may thus be deprived of the potential profit that could have been realized if the same multiplied commodities were not shared amongst users, but sold by the profit-making actors, and bought instead. When commodities are exchanged between users on a large scale, as they are today on the peer-to-peer networks, capitalism panics and looks for ways to prevent this. Most of the exchange on peer-to-peer networks is not free software, but films, music, software in general, newspapers and books. Yet, not only that vast majority of those networks are run by Free Software, it is Free Software principles and work practices that set the precedent, that made claims that destabilised the flow of those commodities and the structure of the ideology which governs that flow today.

Free Software’s most controversial claim is that software should be free to obtain, modify and share. Richard Stallman justifies this principle by arguing that encourages cooperation, helps social cohesion and is beneficial for all, and not just for a few, which is not the case when software is treated like any other commodity. Free Software is about ethics, and law should follow ethics, not the other way around. An examples is the creation of copyright and patents, brought into place because it was thought that it was beneficial for society to protect and encourage creators of art and science. Today, discussing software, Stallman claims that this is not the case any more. What if we apply the same model to all commodities which can be multiplied and shared electronically, digitally storable arts, science and entertainment (Stallman, 2002: 73)? In other words, what if all current peer-to-peer Internet exchange proclaimed the same rights that Stallman proclaimed for software? One obvious difference is that Stallman is the creator of software who refused to treat it as a commodity in the capitalist economy, and who offered a generic way for doing so, while artists and scientists whose work is being exchanged on the networks didn’t necessarily do the same. Instead, users made the decision, regardless of what creators think of it. Why? Because they can, because it is relatively easy to do and because the reward is vast, easily obtainable amount of entertainment, education and production (software) material. Isn’t this similar to the labourer/capitalist relation?

Capitalists do whatever they want with the product of workers whose labour they buy. I hear you saying, but what about the salary? Isn’t that the pay in return? Of course it isn’t! Labour is sold under the conditions entirely set by the owners of capital who require labour. With the exception of a tiny number of stars, there is no negotiation about the way in which relation between capitalist and worker will be formed. It is an one-sided offer to the worker: take it or leave it. Today, even for highly skilled workers, that offer contains clauses which state that copyright for all work, related to what capitalist enterprise does, done by the worker belongs to the capitalist. Including any work done during the time off paid work. Again, with rare exceptions, there is no choice about this clause, it is a widely spread practice. In short, worker has to comply with the rules set by the capitalists. He/she has no choice. The capitalist takes away any participation of the worker in anything to do with the product, other than the salary. In vast majority of the cases, in the West, that salary is enough to live on, participate in the consumption of mass produced commodities, but no more than that. State does prescribes some rules about those work relationships but those do not enter the sphere with which we’re concerned with here. The worker has no means by which she can challenge her relationship with the product of his/her work. The freedom of choice that capitalists and their state regimes like to praise so much is confined to the sphere of commodities and consumption only.

PeerToPeer and Free Drugs democracy

When digitally storable entertainment, art and science are denied commodity status, we can see this as a rare case of people internationally imposing their will against all the odds, against capitalists, states and laws. As reflected in the sales pitch of the largest network company in the world, it is widely acknowledged that peer-to-peer traffic makes up majority of all broadband Internet traffic (over seventy percent in the highest estimates) and that it “consumes network resource without creating additional revenue” (Cisco, 2007). What is this if not gigantic decommodification by any means available? Through those networks, part of what capitalists take from people through surplus value, through profits, through denial of participation in the results of their labour and through centuries-long undermining of development of democracy, is being taken back. Users of peer-to-peer networks see no need for such goods to be treated as property.

Why not call this democracy? Because it shuns the concept of the liberal right to property? What if people, vasts number of people, like it is the case with peer-to-peer networks, do not care about the right to property in the case of digitally storable entertainment, art and science? Isn’t democracy, in the liberal concept, meant to be the rule of the majority? On this issue, can it be any clearer what the vast number of people, possibly majority of people, want? And doesn’t this give us a glimpse of how different society could be if neither creation of laws and policies, nor structuring of society through political acts according to those laws and policies (education in UK is again a good example of this), is done through liberal-capitalist political forms of parliaments, elections, representatives? Thus, corporate and state repressive acts against the sharing of digitally storable entertainment, art and science are anti-democratic acts. Instead, rewriting of laws on property to support sharing whenever possible, like in these digitally storable cases, would be an act in the spirit of democracy. Such democratic acts are prevented through the forms that liberal-capitalist politics takes. Challenges that peer-to-peer networks acts of sharing create are not just challenges to the liberal ideology of property rights and to the ways through which laws and political institutions treat digitally storable property according to that ideology, but to the above mentioned political forms through which liberal-capitalist coalition asserts its anti-democratic ideology and rule. For Ranciere (2006 : 96)

Democracy is neither a form of government that enables oligarchies to rule in the name of the people, nor is it a form of society that governs the power of commodities. It is the action that constantly wrests the monopoly of public life from oligarchic governments, and the omnipotence over lives from the power of wealth.

Yet, regardless of his disagreement for the potential for a democracy of multitude through immaterial forms of capitalist production (Foucault 1980: 27) warned Maoists to reject the state for similar reasons), we’re following Ranciere’s affirmative description of democracy: egalitarian society as a set of egalitarian relations traced to singular, precarious acts. Free Software is one such act. As well as Swedish pirate party and its call for removal of pharmaceutical patents (Pirate Party, 2007).

Given today’s drugs, AIDS could be contained worldwide in relatively short period of time, but corporations and governments stand in the way of millions dying being protected (Badiou, 2007). Like people who decide to share online, they choose to do so, because they can, because nothing, no one, stands in their way. The production of drugs could follow the example of Free Software, be created in a more collaborative way, publishing recipes and allowing it to be freely produced, by anyone, for any purpose. If this was the case, controllable and curable diseases like malaria and AIDS, who together kill tens of millions of people every year, could be put under the control in most of the world. Yet this doesn’t happen. Why? We can assume it is because their work needs different tools and material conditions, and that prevents them from working in low cost environments, which confines them to academic and corporate world. If later is the case, we could conclude that it is the domination of capital over all other considerations, primacy of private over public, that prevents decommodification acts of Free Software to be repeatable in the sphere of free drugs. However, as the Swedish Pirate Party demonstrates, in Europe, the vast majority of drug research money already comes from taxes. Hence, a Free Software model for generic drugs might not be such a remote proposal. Instead of pushing through a neo-liberal constitution, Europe could, and should do the opposite act, create an institutional Free Drugs scientific movement, based on the Free Software hackers model, following the logic of copyleft (Stallman, 2002: 89), patented for free production and reuse of all documentation, as a gift of its citizens to the world.

One could argue that after centuries of military domination and exploitation, something like this is due. When ethics and its laws in the West allow death on such scale to occur, although the society has the means to prevent it, we have to ask: what is the difference between tens of millions dead in two world wars and the dead of malaria and AIDS today? The former were killed while later are allowed to die. Ethics complicit in mass death, an annually repeated disaster, not an one off event like the world wars, is the ethics of the West today: because our laws allow those deaths to occur.

The Creative Commons and Free Culture movements (Lessig, 2004) are attempts to provide other creators – in the fields of art and science, in branches where low-cost production is not entirely dependent on submission to the dictate of private sphere and of capital – a simple way of releasing their work into the existing legal framework under rules related to those of Free Software. While neo-liberal ideology divides people into strictly managed consumers whose interaction with society is measured in detail and accordingly monetarily arranged (recent example of this in the UK are student fees where the main claim is that it is those who study and their families that should bear the cost, and not society at large), Free Software claims that it is worth contributing to society at large, worth sharing and cooperating. Stallman challenged the conservative dogma that “there is no society”¹⁸, showing, through his axiomatic, unilateral acts, through his fidelity to the event (broken printer) and principles that came out of it, that there is, indeed, a society, since, there is something that is socially beneficial i.e. global collaborative production of globally shared wealth, in the sphere of software.

At the same time, corporations like IBM and Oracle, some of the main engines of this world order, of our silicon cage, have been integrating Free Software into the core of that world order. It is our task, as Badiou and Passolini did for Paul, to make it difficult, hopefully impossible, for them and their ideological partners, to integrate a milder, capitalist friendly, or even capitalist agnostic, version of Richard Stallman’s revolutionary truth, his fidelity to the event that changed him, and to the world we share, truly share, when it comes to software. Our task is to insist on the potential of coordinates that his act has rewritten, on new coordinates of possibilities that his acts opens up, coordinates of global collaborative, voluntary, production of common global wealth, of Free Drugs and similar ideas. In Stallman’s own words: “constructive anarchism does not mean advocating a dog-eat-dog jungle. American society is already a dog-eat-dog jungle and its rules maintain it that way. We [hackers] wish to replace those rules with a concern for constructive cooperation.” (Levy, 1984:416). Reasons for Free Software are possibly best explained in earliest words of Stallman from 1983, when he didn’t believe that software should be owned, because such practice “sabotages humanity as a whole” (p.419) – this is precisely what capitalism does in the example of life saving drugs given above. Today we know that he wasn’t alone feeling this way, because the results of his call for collaboration are known: it is a success. Given the hostility of capitalist economy towards the kind of ideas he stood for, it is a huge success. Yet, what if all obstacles to cooperation and sharing sabotage to humanity? And how do we proceed towards global collaboration and the creation of global common wealth in the spheres of life which do not posses the magical attribute of software, science and arts, which makes the latter electronically storable and reproducible form, in Western terms, low cost?

Many, including myself, have tried to study this question by investigating what is specific to the production of Free Software in the context in which it takes place and whether Free Software principles can be applied to material production. But, so far, the more I looked, the more research has lead me to think that these questions cannot be investigated in isolation. Before we can think about them, other issues have to be studied first. The large scale on which society has lost the track of ideas of equality, cooperative production and shared wealth – the scale of the loss of belief in the possibility of such ideas and political projects – has to be dealt with in parallel to the phenomenon of Free Software. It is not possible to invent new politico-economic practices without inventing an ideology that will provide a framework to support them. Without such a framework of thought, any action will remain embedded in the currently ruling (neo)liberal capitalist framework.

To give a small example: there is plenty of talk about the openness of software source code in England, yet, the history of land registry prior to 1996, strangely enough, remains closed. And apart from fringe activist groups, no one seem to be concerned with it. In the city where this text is written, one man, known under the title Duke of Westminster, among his other vast assets, owns large parts (120 hectares) of the land in one of the most expensive locations in the world, central London. His ownership is the outcome of the forced enclosure of common land, which was the start of privatization of common resources in UK, yet there have been only two surveys of land ownership in British history: the first was in 1086, and the second was in 1872. To this day, there is no mandatory record of land ownership in England prior to 1996.

How convenient and easy it is to forget that, while a large part of the software source code that assists life on this land might be available to inspect, change and share, information on the ownership of the land, the most basic resource on which all human life depends, is not. Yet there is hardly any challenge to this glaring paradox. If we examine the concepts on which Free Software thrives – such as access to source code, open collaboration, sharing, placing ethics before law, reliance on axiomatic principles – in the wider social context, in the context of the creation and concentration/distribution of wealth throughout history, we find vast paradoxes, in every sphere of life I considered. In other words, we face the question of how to challenge and reinvent ideas and beliefs first; practice follows second. If this was not the case, if the importance of ideas and beliefs was not central, the rift between Open Source and Free Software would not have been such a great issue. Although Stallman understands the importance of ideas well, the core of his explanation of this rift misses the most important point about ideology, a point which Zizek so forcefully brings back to our attention again and again: it is not enough to say that we’re just doing something, but that we don’t believe in it, or that we don’t have a set of beliefs as such. This is how ideology functions: it requires us to do things, and belief arrives as a result of doing it, not the other way around. And what better proof do we need than successful spread of the rule of neo-liberalism through their claims of “just doing it” for the sake of the economy, without any ideological beliefs? As if any economy, or any act, was possible without decisions determined by a set of ideas and beliefs. This is why Nike’s slogan “just do it” is the best summary of capitalist ideology ever. And this is why “Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement”(Stallman, 2007a), misses the crucial point. We need to recognise this point in order to be able to engage in the analysis of ideas about Free Software, but more importantly, in the analysis of ideas in their historical context, which carries all the traces of the paradoxes which the existence of Free Software makes manifest.

It is crucial to understand, and always keep in mind when thinking about Free Software, that Open Source is not just a development methodology, but a social movement too, a social movement of a different kind, with different, capitalist, goals. A proof of the strength and effect of its ideology is in our inability to see it as a social movement with defined goals, or at least in our failure to insist on analyzing it consistently and thoroughly as such. For example, Stallman, like most other Free Software writers, clearly points out the business orientation of Open Source, even quoting its founding members, whose main goal was to make Free Software business-friendly. No one disputes this well-documented history. The problem lies in claims that Open Source separates ethics from the technical side of Free Software (Stallman, 2007a), thus making it acceptable to corporations. Like the above claim that Open Source is just a development methodology, this kind of thinking implies two wrong statements about Open Source: first, that it has no ethics of its own, and second, that there are purely technical solutions which can be used without any ethical, political, or ideological commitments. The result of these mistakes is the widespread comparison of Free Software and Open Source on the wrong terms: one operating under the weight and demand of its ethics, and the other getting away without being examined at all, basking in the purity of its technical attributes and various business-friendly tags. This is how the ethics, ideology and, indeed, politics of Open Source slip through unexamined and unchallenged, like capitalist ideologies whose crucial strategy has historically been to accuse any political opponents of ethical commitments, while insisting on their own “pragmatism” and on the purely technical aspect of “just getting things done”.

Revolutionary justice

One of the important ideals of hackers was not just getting the job done, it was getting it done in the best possible way. To do so, access to the most useful information, at all times, was essential – another reason for dedication to openness of information as a non-negotiable principle. Other important ideals were to have access to the best possible computer and to always striving to excellence and elegance (Williams, 2002:47). In computer programming, elegance is linked with simplicity, readability, re-usability and non wasteful use of resources¹⁹. Dennis M. Ritchie (1984), one of designers of the Unix operating system considered the principle of non-hierarchical control of the flow, achieved by the invention of mechanism called a pipe, as “one of the most widely admired contributions of Unix to the culture of operating systems and command language”. Since changing the world through software was what hackers spoke openly about, it shouldn’t come as surprise that what they saw as worst obstacles were poor software (non excellence), academic bureaucracy (opaqueness and fixed structure) and selfish behaviour (Williams, 2002: 48).

For Levy(1984:41) the openness that hackers believe in, free flow of information, is not just fundamental to pursue of improvement and knowledge, but also to the functioning of computer code where it is up to programmer to devise how information gets moved, processed, and which components of the system (hardware, network) take part in it. According to him, one of the biggest enemies of hackers is bureaucracy of any kind (corporate, government, university), because it can not incorporate impulses of hackers to explore and because it hides behind arbitrary rules invoked to keep the power while perceiving hackers’ desire to construct new as a threat. At the heart of this dislike was hackers’ preference for work and life organized in a de-centralized, meritocratic way where “hackers should be judged by the way they judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position” (1984: 43). This brings us to another aspect of open access in Free Software, equality.

In Richard Stallman’s words, signing a non disclosure agreement meant promising to refuse to cooperate with the entire planet (Williams, 2002: 21). In Unix, operating system that inspired the creation of Linux, design goals are to allow multiple users to access the computer at the same time and share resources (Lucent Technologies, 2002). Although to this day the most widely used operating system, Microsoft Windows, is designed around the concept of a single computer for a single user, the vast majority of the world’s communication systems, including the Internet, runs on various computer systems derived from Unix design philosophy of simultaneous multiuser sharing. Paradoxically, at a time when an ideology of the dominant West thrived, through the victories of the neo-liberal project based on declared individualism and reckless consumerism, it was the invention of computing components (Unix/GNU/Linux) and principles (Free Software) for cooperation and sharing that enabled the West to make rapid scientific and military progress. Today, when it seems that even Europe has imploded into it, the neo-liberal ideological project²⁰ and an evolved form of this technology for cooperation and sharing (Linux/Free Software), coexist in parallel.

Coleman and Hill (2004) show how two organizations that are generally considered to be diametrically opposed to each other in political terms, Indymedia²¹ and IBM both use Free Software successfully, and both promote it enthusiastically as desirable and beneficial, simultaneously in line with the ideological frameworks of the global capitalist group, IBM, and the similarly global alter-globalization group Indymedia. In one of the most interesting researches on the subject, for Coleman (Summer 2004), main political characteristic of Free Software, according to claims made by the people involved in its production, is agnosticism. Programmers consider politics to be dysfunctional, not reliable and getting in their way of getting things done. Instead, as expressed in the main documents of the movement, their “commitment is to prevent limiting the freedom of others” while allowing for unbound circulation of thought, expression, and action for software development. Although it is clear that Free Software has been highly beneficial to various political actors, it is unconvincing to say that it is politically agnostic because official political sphere doesn’t interest Free Software producers, or, as Coleman develops it, because it functions as internal criticism of liberalism by liberalism, criticizing the concept of intellectual property using the concept of free speech (Coleman, 2005). As she correctly observes, its roots are drawn from the liberal value of free speech, which, if we would call it politically agnostic – regardless of what its producers claim – would privilege position of liberalism as one outside of ideology. We know that such position doesn’t exist (Zizek1994: 1-32). Quite the contrary, liberal ideological postulates are the basis for today’s attempts of the West to impose a new, more sophisticated, form of imperialism (Mattei, 2003). Coleman claims that “Free and open source hackers have been effective in coding FLOSS as politically removed neutrality made material and socially effective through licenses.” (p.513), but as we saw from the Open Source movement starting goals, and consistently through their acts, they worked hard to convince capitalist elite, specifically targeting Forbes 500 companies, that one shouldn’t be put off by the radicalism of Free Software. Ian Murdoch’s claims about natural laws of the markets are textbook neo-liberal political propaganda. Hence, when Coleman writes about software participants and how “It is felt that if FLOSS was directed towards a political end, it would sully the purity of the technical decision-making process.” (p.512), does that exclude people like Ian Murdoch, or indeed entire ideological leadership of Open Source movement? Does it mean that their persistent sales pitch to capitalist elites spoiled technical decision making process? If that’s not the case, should we not conclude that, in order to justify Free Software producers’ own theses on political agnosticism, we should treat capitalism as politically neutral, hence the Open Source sales pitch didn’t compromise on directing Free Software towards a political end, because capitalism itself is politically neutral? In Coleman’s own analysis, in several places, she points out political aspects: how Free and Open Source Software practices challenge neo-liberal expansion of intellectual property rights through copyleft, or how it served as a template for other social groups too (Coleman, 2005: 15-16). How are we to reconcile this with notions of neutrality, or political agnosticism? These seemingly un-reconcilable sides: anti-capitalist activism and criticism of neo-liberalism versus capitalism and neo-liberal propaganda, are both part of social phenomena which is, and I agree completely with Coleman here, both intriguing and frustrating to a researcher. What to me seems to be the source of further complications of this problem, in Coleman’s work, is mixing of Free Software and Open Source into one term (F/OSS, or FLOSS). Stallman explained the importance of differences between the two on many occasions: Free Software is a social movement; its freedoms promote social solidarity, sharing and cooperation; Open Source is a development methodology considered by some as a pragmatic campaign for free software, while some reject any ethical and social values of free software and focus only on technical aspects (Stallman, 2007a).

This strange path of logic of technical decision-making process and its purity is uncannily close to the neo-liberal use of the general concept of technical decision-making in governance, a political ideological concept where opinion of specialized workers is presented as apolitical, thus allowing the rule of “experts”, regardless of the formally existing political power structure. Is it coincidence that these apolitical specialists, those “administrators of local consequences of global historical necessity”, as Ranciere 2006:81) calls them, are always proponents of the same known principles that neo-liberalism thrives on? How come there are no anarchist, communist, or even social-democrat specialists whose apolitical purity will drive policies of entire states regardless of what type of government actually rules? The answer is unsurprisingly simple, because those specialists aren’t neutral, aren’t apolitical.

For Stallman, Free Software is an ethical imperative. I would add that, as analysis shows, Free Software is also a politics act. At the time when rich dominant Western entities (states, corporations, lobbying organizations), through patents²² and copyrights, work on imposing the regime of their rule over more of the world’s knowledge and productive information, at the time of this latest wave of enforced commodification, privatization and centralization of wealth, Free Software is a movement that acts in the opposite direction, direction of de-commodification, enlargement of public sphere, and decentralization of wealth through shared software. Open Source is an explicit, clearly stated, attempt to re-direct, re-package, Free Software towards neo-liberal political actors and their goals. Although Coleman is technically right when she writes that for hackers “ideal and idealized form is a transparent meritocracy.” – Free Software community is indeed proud for its openness to participation – it is worth remembering that Stallman’s starting principles are anything but meritocratic. He didn’t say that those who contribute more to society will get more and better software, or that those who can afford more will get more. Free Software freedoms are for all users, without any reference, or implied link, to their merit or wealth. This is the radical egalitarian and political message. Useful example of Free Software’s political potential comes from Peru, where Free Software became a way to adjust political economic relations in favour of less powerful state, a political question in the most classical meaning of the word. After long lobbying, government decided to turn completely to Free Software because it is the only way to guarantee its citizens that the constitution will be upheld (Chan, 2004).

In his recent book, Badiou (2006) sets up four main principles for the revolutionary justice: voluntary participation, economic justice (wealth redistribution), terror (punishment for sabotage and contra-revolution), trust in all people. Free Software maps well onto three of these, while missing the terror. However, idea of punishment, base for terror, for sabotage is not unknown to Richard Stallman: “Those who do not share their creativity with society deserve to be punished” (Williams, 2002: 105). During the “Symbolics war”, fight with one of the first companies that denied access to source code to Stallman as early as 1982, he was thinking of wrapping himself in dynamite and blowing whole building out (2002: 97).

Hacking the regime of equal rights

Let’s recall main premises of Marx’s Critique of equal right in his Critique of Gotha programme:

“equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour … Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only
… one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labour, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.” (Marx, 1993).

These are the limits of egalitarian potential of Free Software, or any other system of right proclaiming principles. Yet, there is an element of Free Software which fits in Marx’s vision of communist society. One of the most important principles Marx envisioned for communism was “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”. To get to that point what had to happen is that “all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly” and only then can bourgeois right be overcome. It has been said on many occasions that Stallman’s biggest hack is reuse of regime of copyright to ensure sharing in public sphere i.e. to ensure opposite of what was intended with the creation of copyright. Could we not say that, in a similar fashion, Stallman’s use of concept of rights – which, as Marx so vividly explains, maintain the economic differences and ensure that structure (names of capitalists can change) of economic inequalities in society persists – was also a hack? Core principle in the normal functioning of the regime of rights on which capitalism thrives is right on property. Stallman re-conceptualized the idea of rights to encourage volunteer, co-operative and decommodified society with the notion of shared wealth. Can we read openness to participation of Free Software as a step towards society where one contributes according to one’s abilities (from each according to his ability)? Equally, can we read the availability of software in public sphere that Free Software ensures as a step towards society where one will be able to take what one needs (to each according to his needs)? Since software is a form of wealth, is not sharing of software built in cooperation an act which ensures that “springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly”? In short, is not reuse of concept of rights another hack of anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic liberal-capitalism by Richard Stallman, a hack in the spirit of communism as imagined by Marx?

Free Software and academia

What are the possible consequences/uses of Free Software for academia? Let’s read academia through Free Software, for a change.

To start with, why should the artifacts of academia not be available for sharing? They are also a product of creative work, indeed, and thus fall under Stallman’s category of the most valuable contribution to society. How does a digital copy of text, or sound, or video differ from code? In terms of engagement with the material, code gets edited, parts get reused, parts rejected. The product of academic production, other than education for students, is vast amounts of written and audio materials (it is common for student to record a lecture in digital audio). Yet, not only that all that gets locked up within universities, but it is rare that it is shared amongst students. One could argue that utility of such material is an entirely different kind, since not every lecture is necessarily considered good enough by the lecturer for wider distribution. However, given the number of students doing audio recordings those days, distribution of material is no longer in the hands of academics. It could well prove to be that all it lacks is someone as determined as Richard Stallman, or indeed, any other axiomatic revolutionary, who will position his/her truth in terms of fidelity to the event, in the sense of Badiou’s reading of Paul.

Why is the Open University the only university with an intense focus on audio and video material and online educational tools? Why are their materials available only to those who can commit to pay for it? Once materials have been produced, given the existing level of ownership of personal computers throughout Western society, the price of their digital reproduction is close to zero. Also, if the Open University can do it, so could others, especially given that others can learn from Open University’s experiences in the production, management and use of digital learning materials. Yet, despite the existing pioneer model of the Open University, and the largely state-financed production of educational materials, access to them remains closed in internal campus networks and online journals. Those journals have been one of the most frustrating issues I have faced during the past three years of my undergraduate education.

Each university subscribes to online journals. Students get access only to those journals to which their university has subscribed too. In practice, given the amount of academic publishing, students get access to tiny fraction of what is relevant. If the student has multidisciplinary interests, the result is even worse, since universities only subscribe to a selection of journals that match their departments. How is this relevant to Free Software? Most authors publishing in academic journals do not get paid for what they publish. Many of them also edit the same journals without pay too. In other words, most of them are volunteers. What they get instead is increased potential for future employment and future earnings as writers. The same applies to Free Software programmers; with every job they do as volunteers, future earnings in the form of employment opportunities, get increased. With the exception of publicly funded projects, programmers do this work in their own spare time. In the case of academia, roughly speaking, it is a combination of the two: some writing and journal editing is done as part of academic employment while the rest is one during private time. One significant difference is that Free Software creates a body of public software that is today widely used worldwide, reducing the cost of computing. With academia, most of the volunteer work, some of which it is already funded by the public and by current students, is enclosed in on-line databases of journals. The cost of individual articles is rarely less than the cost of an entire expensive new book, which means that buying any of these is out of the question. No one buys them.

The cost is there to prevent individual access and enforce institutional subscriptions only. How did this come about? Volunteerism and publicly paid work of academics benefit large corporate publishing companies, while students and citizens of states who to a large extent pay for it are denied access to the vast majority of it. Academics are not in a much better position though, since they share the destiny of their students, with equally poor access, and must settle for any benefits that this might bring to their career. Given that it is difficult to find a job in academia without publishing in such journals, the choice that academics have isn’t really a choice, if they want to work in academia. Volunteer contribution to corporate publishers resembles a mandatory welfare program for private wealth that everyone has to take part in. Closed access journals are a form of privatization by proxy, where the level of corruption of public funds depends on set of economic parameters: the level of public funding and the amount of journals published by the university, which do bring some funds back (Taylor and Ruiz III, 2007). Although there are some initiatives for publicly funded knowledge to be accessible to the public (for Taxpayer Access, 2007), for open access to knowledge in general (iCommons summit, 2006), even for open access to publicly funded data (Guardian newspaper initiative from 2006), the most interesting development is in the practice of peer reviewed open access journals (of Open Access Journals”, 2007), an attempt to maintain the filtering that academia provides with the benefit of easy online publishing provided by the new generation of on-line publishing tools. An initiative that came out of meeting in Budapest in 2001 stated that they were inspired by the Free Software movement’s practices and the availability of the software tools it provides (Initiative, 2007).

In parallel with the rise of Free Software, on the fringes of academia, substantial criticism of the regime of intellectual property has arisen. Liang (2004) has elaborated many points on how the existing legal framework of knowledge and culture only came into existence with the rise of global capitalism, primarily in twentieth century. One of his claims is that, contrary to its original purpose of striking a balance between the public interest and an incentive for authors to create, today’s regime has arisen in order to prevent, not promote, creativity and invention. These are not radical claims any more, and certainly not on the fringes of academia only. Recently, some of the more mainstream parts of academia have been asking why the situation of culture, knowledge and the sciences developed into such a strict legal regime. For Sackville (2007: 34), it is because the economic well-being of some groups in society depends on the privatization of resources. In this case, he claims, it is intellectual resources that have been under the attack of groups who are well resourced, organized and have powerful lobbying mechanisms, direct access to both national governments and the formation of international treaties. This echoes the findings of a long anthropological and historical research study by Drahos (2006) who sought to understand the reasons why governments in many states worldwide were adopting copyright and patent laws, when there was no understanding of the advantage²³those laws will bring to their economies. The field work for this study took place over a period of several years in many cities in Europe, USA and Asia, but four cities, Washington, New York, Brussels and Geneva, emerged as the centres of decision-making and policy-making. According to Drahos, it was a highly centralized, well planned assault on wealth that was until that time not considered to be private. Imperialism of knowledge met with little or no resistance. Networks of corporate lobbyists have linked the intellectual property regime with the trade regime. Recommendations to governments by private commissioned consulting bodies often get translated into marching orders. He concludes with the obvious: “Knowledge capitalism cares more about its mode of production and monopoly profits than it does about producing low cost medicines for the poor in developing countries.”. Drahos’ research shows the negative influence on the world that Western assault of imposition of patents and copyright is having. How can then Free Software, a movement battling for the opposite, for sharing of intellectual wealth, a movement which inspired and enabled other movements with similar goals (open access in academia), not be political, regardless of what free software programmers might claim?

Conclusions

In our neo-liberal times, Free Software is a rare secular return of thinking beyond the accountants’ spreadsheets. It is a return to an affirmative, axiomatic, belief in thinking about society as one. It divides – as in its sharply defined and defended division between free and non-free software – in order to unite in a volunteer, co-operative society. Free Software is a hack of not just the regime of copyright, but of the concept of equal rights as well. Some of its goals are the goals that Marx has set in his vision of communist society. Yet, the Open Source Initiative was formed by a part of the hacker community to re-package and sell the idea of Free Software stripped of its radicalism to the richest corporations in the world. The sociology of hackers and Free Software has been predominantly unashamedly liberal, which isn’t a problem. The problem starts when such ideological positions are interwoven with theory without reflection on how those political commitments, affect the theory itself, its coordinates, its possible and “impossible” outcomes. Part of this unspoken political commitment is that work of Max Weber has been used extensively in various analyses of hackers and Free Software, yet, it is not insights found across his work that have been used, but his most known final conclusion alone. From a communist, egalitarian, anarchist, anti-capitalist and anti-meritocratic stance, Free Software has hardly been theorized at all. It has been idealized, and for such idealizations criticised (Rossiter, 2006). The work of Alain Badiou offers a way to read Free Software as an egalitarian revolutionary act. The book published in 1999 by O’Reilly, in which creators of Open Source coalition wrote about their work, was named “Open Sources: Voices from the Revolution”. For them, revolution was in making the world largest corporations invest in and buy into the concept of Free Software stripped of its radicalism. The correct name for such a book should have been Voices from the Coup. This is where the line of division lies. Social theory, so far, has seemed to be able to avoid reflection on this division. Yet, it is only by insisting on this division that radical egalitarian potential of Free Software can be rendered visible.

Most of the books and texts written by academics have already been paid for, with their salaries, at least in Europe, coming from the state budget. Why is this material in vast majority of cases confined to closed university networks for current students only? How come academics, whilst being paid by the state, work for free for publishers, publishers who in many cases (especially when it comes to journals) hardly do any work, yet who collect the money from books and subscriptions to journals? Although the raging EU battle for mandatory Open Access for all government funded research has been well documented (Poynder, 2007), given that a large part of all academic books is also written on the time paid for by public education funds, we should extend the demand for open access to such works too. These are some of outstanding issues related to academia that theory and practice of Free Software raises. It is to be hoped that these questions will be addressed in the near future. However, it seems to me that it is only an act as axiomatic, egalitarian and divisive as that of Richard Stallman, and fidelity to the event that gives birth to such an act, in Badiou’s sense, that can antagonise these issues to the extent that they can no longer be ignored.

If we are to agree that democratic process is a process of subjects who “reconfigure the distributions of the public and the private”, who challenge the privatization based on birth, wealth and ‘competence’, privatization guarded by the police and the State (Ranciere, 2006:61-2); if we are to agree that this process can not be identified with juridico-political forms, because such forms always refer to the people, to incompetents (p.54) – Ranciere reminds us that capitalist parliamentary regimes couldn’t justify themselves if they didn’t refer to the people who vote and thus ‘choose’ those who rule and legislate on their behalf – it follows that peer-to-peer networks could be seen as such, democratic, processes.

Here’s how a definition of Free Drugs, another possible process of reconfiguration of the public and the private, could be inherited from Free Software:

• The freedom to use the drug, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the drug works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the drug recipe (blueprint) and acceptance through regulated clinical trials are preconditions for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies of the drug and its recipe (blueprint) so you can help your neighbour (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the drug, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the drug recipe (blueprint) and acceptance through regulated clinical trials are preconditions for this.

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Footnotes

…

… Software²

Up to date statistics on some aspects of this are at http://news.netcraft.com

… today³

A group of influential social actors in UK have been using Free Software as an example of how production and innovation can be increased with a model that differs from the predominant one focused on conceptualization of new types of property, private ownership of that new property and its protection by widening and strengthening the law that applies to it (copyright and patents). See Adelphi charter website that shows some of the tensions between the multiplicity of actors/demands for the change in this predominant increase in property and law and actual workings of the national (UK) and supra-national (EU) institutional frameworks of governance

… Hacker⁴

Hacker’s manifesto (Wark, 2004) deserves inclusion in this research, but because of its complexity and vast amount of attention it needs, it is too large for this occasion.

…
better⁵

German Chaos Computer Club, one of the most known and active network of hacker’s clubs in the world, added to those points in 1980’s two more: g) don’t litter other people’s data; h) make public data available, protect private data (Club, 2007)

…
years⁶

Notable exception to this that comes to mind quickly is London based small publisher Mute whose imprint Mute vol 2 has been last few years consistently publishing essays on FreeSoftware related subjects while resisting opportunistic short cuts.

…
areas⁷

Although not directly related to hackers and computing, Celia Lury’s work (1993: chap.2) offers some riskier and more useful insights into the some of the core issues for the world of hackers, namely lack of pattern, predictability in production of art and the difficulty of fully commodifying art under capitalism, and the reproducibility of art through technology.

… case⁸

Throughout the book, Weber showed how diverse protestant branches, sects, are, and how careful one has to be when linking Protestantism with capitalism. Yet, he nevertheless does it, shielding himself, in the beginning of the conclusive chapter of the book, called Asceticism
and the spirit of capitalism, with the remark: “For the purposes of this chapter, though by no means for all purposes, we can treat ascetic Protestantism as a single whole.” (Weber, 1965: 36)

… today⁹

Several issues central to debates on intriguing aspects of hackers and Free Software, especially those related to organization of human groups engaged in production, are central points of Weber’s work (Weber, 1964).

…
Oekonux¹⁰

See http://www.oekonux.org/

… Source¹¹

In The Revenge of the Hackers, Eric Raymond talks about Open Source goals: “Our success after Netscape would depend on replacing the negative FSF stereotypes with positive stereotypes of our own-pragmatic tales, sweet to managers’ and investors’ ears, of higher reliability and lower cost and better features. In conventional marketing terms, our job was to re-brand the product, and build its reputation into one the corporate world would hasten to buy.” (DiBona et al., 1999)

… work¹²

Recent Demos report has six references to the Open Source, and zero to the Free Software. (Gallagher Niamh, 2007)

…
Source¹³

Lack of understanding of the difference between Open Source and Free Software is best seen when in one of the masterpieces of recent social theory term “open-source” is referenced with the “Free as in Freedom” book on Stallman (Negri and Hardt 2004: 300)

…
O’Reilly¹⁴

Their conferences, books, lobbying were, are, at the heart of the Open Source movement. Their attempts to explain the logic behind their activism are still without serious theoretical reflection. For example, in Open Source and the Commoditization of Software, we can learn from Ian Murdoch, founder of Debian, one of the most important and popular distributions of Linux, that “standardization, and thus commodification, are both natural market forces as well as key events in human history” (DiBona et al., 2005)!

… code¹⁵

The source code is blueprint written in a computer programming language, from which computer applications are assembled.

… right”¹⁶

See file called CodingStyle in the Linux kernel v1.3.53 from the 1995, also available at http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/

… wars¹⁷

One about which text editor is better to use, Vi or Emacs, is one of the best known religious wars amongst hackers.

… society”¹⁸

Quote is available at http://briandeer.com/social/thatcher-society.htm

… resources¹⁹

See http://claire3.free.fr as an example of striving for elegance in programming language design.

… project²⁰

The most consistent reporting on this has been by french monthly newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique. For example, Halimi (2002) provides a short history of neo-liberal victory to become a world dominant ideology, while Cassen (2005) explains why voting “NO” in the past French referendum for the new EU constitution would not be a bad thing.

… Indymedia²¹

Indymedia is a network of alter-globalization collectives and websites based on the principle of open publishing.

… patents²²

Steep rise in the number of patents granted and submitted in USA since 1980 is visible from the official state statistics (USA Patent and Trademark Office, 2006).

…
advantage²³

Goldstein (1994) provides a good overview of history of copyright in USA and UK, and makes clear who its original beneficiaries were. See the chapter History of an idea.

Abstract: The desires and the sources of emancipatory potential of the commons for the cooperative and egalitarian global 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 [...]]]>

Abstract: The desires and the sources of emancipatory potential of the commons for the cooperative and egalitarian global 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.

Introduction

For the last ten years, the world has been misled. We were lead to believe that the key attribute of cooperation amongst networking and software communities since 1960’s has been that the source code is open. The term to describe it, Open Source, has become synonymous with this idea. The name, and the concept behind it, has captured the imagination in many areas (Category:Open – P2P Foundation). To name just couple of larger, more influential examples in academia, and politics: Open Access, Open Science, and Obama’s pledge for Open Government (Obama 2009).

Open Source was re-applied across society mostly through two aspects. Primarily it is to mean that the final product has to be open (Open Access). In some cases, first aspect was accompanied with the second one, usually through a commitment to transparency and participation (Open Government). Re-applications of the Open Source paradigm that mention in more detail HOW is the second aspect, commitment to transparency and participation, going to be achieved, what are its principles, mechanism, processes and safeguards, are missing.

This is no coincidence. Beyond its founding analysis, Open Source never defined itself through a set of principles that would ensure open processes in cooperation. Instead, it is a narrow, business, for-profit focused subset of the volunteer driven cooperative model that gave us hacking, Free Software, open protocols, the Internet and the Web. It is for this reason that modelling other open systems and concepts throughout society on Open Source results in missing the most important aspects of the model.

It was ethics, in Free Software (FS), and a set of defined and respected open processes, in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), that were at the centre of those communities and their inventions. I propose we call this collection of practices and principles the Internet Model.

To benefit from the ground breaking cooperative methodology of the software and networking communities, we need to think about them, and about their contributions, in a new way. A way that will not be composed of a selective choice according to what suits capitalism and private interests. On the contrary, a way that will make open-process volunteer cooperation that has developed outside and despite of capitalism and institutional bureaucracy and coercive labour, central to it.

It was openness of the processes of cooperation that was the key attribute of communities and their inventions. Hence, I propose we name it the Open Process.

No hidden status: open process computing and politics

From its earliest days in 1959, to the recent generation of hackers (Lakhani and Wolf 2003), hacking meant to enjoy doing something (Levy 1984, 23). To improve on anything, hackers had to know how something works, so that it can be taken apart, improved on and reassembled in new ways. Any obstacle to this procedure of learning and creation was undesirable (Levy 1984, 40). Bureaucracies of any kind, corporate, government or university, were the worst enemy, since they invoke arbitrary rules – a total contrast to the world hackers were building (Levy 1984, 41). For hackers, the world would be a better place if other approached it “with the same inquisitive intensity, scepticism toward bureaucracy, openness to creativity, unselfishness in sharing accomplishments, urge to make improvements” (Levy 1984, 48). Writing a program was “building a community, not churning out a product” (Levy 1984, 56).

It is a striking parallel that close to the birth of hacking, probably the most innovative and the most important programming language was born too. Lisp was first implemented between 1958 and 1962. Some of its key unique properties were recursion, function type (you can store function in variables, passed as arguments), and “the whole language there all the time” (Graham 2004, 188). This last feature is of the special importance: a running program can be interrupted, examined, state changed, and execution resumed. It embodied that “there was no hidden status anywhere” (Williams 2002, 49), a characteristic praised by Richard Stallman when talking about Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), an early operating system he used in the famous MIT lab.
A user, hacker, could intervene at any point in the process of program execution. This way, not only that “the entire act of hacking relied on intellectual openness and trust”, the structure of ITS was “built to foster this spirit of openness” (Williams 2002, 53). The process is open for being changed, hacking at any stage. These two features, i claim, are at the heart of the hacking spirit, and since they offer a new organizational paradigm, a new model, political consequences of their re-application in new organizational contexts could be immense. Open process and trust: trust in the ability and desire of people to participate in political, economic and juridical tasks, and openness of the processes for participation to be possible.

If we transfer this feature of an operating system (ITS), or a computer language (Lisp) into the political sphere, it would mean complete openness of the source materials and all processes through which materials go, to all interested parties. In practice, in UK, on the level of local councils, it would mean that a resident could have insight in all the work of political bodies. Committees, key places for decision making, are open to citizens. However, whatever a council committee deems secretive gets closed down, and citizens have to leave the meetings when such matters are discussed and documents presented. This limited, selective openness shows both distrust in citizens and reveals what is the overriding founding principle of the liberal democratic order. When processes are closed for local citizens whenever they need to be open for maximizing private profit through commercial interests, we can say that the founding principle of the system is the idea of private property, right to acquire it and gain power over other members of the community based on it.

The source of distrust and founding principle are the same like in the case of Open Source, commercial interests and private profit. In the local council case, in the name of commercial interests, documents containing anything to do with an external private contractor can be, and mostly are, kept secret. Citizens are cut out, the logic of secrecy so central to private accumulation of wealth is imposed. In the case of Open Source, mandate to return any improvements to the distributed code is removed. Again, the logic of secrecy, or market advantage and potential private profit gained by it, is made supreme. Secrecy is essential to the logic of private profit and it goes against open participation, and hence against the possibility of directly participatory democratic systems.

Let us not forget that IBM and Intel, amongst many others, did not believe that anyone would want a small computer (Levy 1984, 189). Steve Jobs’ predictions about the sales of first Apple computer were not much better: he asked one of his components suppliers for a “high volume” order, of fifty units a month. Several years later, the supplier estimated he sold four hundred thousand of those units (Levy 1984, 261). This reminds me of the answer i get when i talk about open process participation of people in political, economic and juridical daily tasks, a new form of direct democracy across key aspect of society: ‘no one cares, no one will be interested’ is the most common remark i get. As the cases of personal computing, electronic networking, e-mail, short message service (SMS) , or social networking confirm, humans embrace new ways of getting in touch with each other beyond what the creators of new ways expect.

The spirit of direct action was another key trait that is essential for reuse in political sphere, dropped by the Open Source paradigm. For Stallman, the link seems to be clear, he saw 19th century slavery abolitionist John Brown a historical figure analogous to himself (Williams 2002, 183). Famously, when there were physical barriers to access, hackers resorted to analysing locks during night time incursions in offices, climbing through ceiling structures, creating blank and master keys, and gaining access to whatever they needed: they “did not bother with such ridiculous concepts such as property rights”, and they didn’t steal nor injure anyone in the process (Levy 1984, 102-107). Mischief was prevented through social pressures enforcing an ethic of improvements and not damage (Levy 1984, 63). This spirit can still be seen at hacker gatherings in the form of The Open Organization of Lockpickers holding there their events regularly (TOOOL 2010).

Volunteer cooperation and communities for all

Networking and software communities that were central to construction of the Internet, the Web and their tools consisted mostly of hackers, engineers and academics. Let us call them the founding communities.

Their political importance does not derive from the results and processes of their work alone. The key political ingredients are their methods of cooperation and most of all consistently repeated claim that technological advances should benefit all. For one, life should be less machine alike for all humans (Himanen 2001, 33), and self-organization of work and time should be part of it.

Freedom to self-organize the time that hackers demand for everyone started in academia. While in the Middle Ages work was task oriented, industrialization and the factory imposed time based (Himanen 2001, 35-6), controlled, or as we learned to call it in the 20th century, managed work. Since information technology tools enabling new forms of cooperation have become widely available, we could go back to the task based work. This is especially the case for the latest generation of Web software enabling creation and tracking of working groups and tasks, collective project management and all the corresponding communication.

If repurposed for the specific context, these tools and new forms of cooperation could be utilized across society, in other spheres of production, politics, law, education. Yet, there is no guarantee that any of it will happen. Quite the contrary, the new wave of tools is used to increase the control over workers under the conditions of time based work (Himanen 2001, 37). Currently, the key assumption is that there are only a few people in any organization mature enough to take decisions. Majority of us are deemed incapable of it, and regardless of the rapid technological changes and the possibilities they open, most people are condemned to obedience (Himanen 2001, 39). Hacker desire to share for all, across society, not just software, but as well their forms of cooperation and work, has a long way to go to materialize.

Contrary to the widely held idea, it can be argued that it was software and networking communities in academic research centres, those founding communities, which seized USA Department of Defence projects and funds and developed the Web and the Internet without direct military direction (Castells 2001, 1975). Our challenge today is that technological revolutions do not come without large cultural transformation, they have to be thought of. This does not happen incrementally. It requires “a vision, and act of belief, a gesture of rebellion” – attributes not directly ascribed, but well applicable to Richard Stallman’s work. At the core of the wave of new tools and practices are distribution of processing capacity and increase of innovation potential by cooperation and sharing. Hacker culture was central to it. Hence, to reap the benefits of the revolutionary leap in technology, new organizations have to be built on hacker culture (Castells 2001, 177).

Open Source movement is an attempt to use the innovation potential for the benefit of private profit, for capitalist goals, which, as i’m attempting to demonstrate here, clashes with the most important features of hacker culture. Yet, long before the Open Source movement was formed, many hackers went on to form companies that became large corporations, adopting their hacker traits to fit the purpose (Thomas 2003, XXII).

The goal of this text is to twofold: one, to show how Open Source limits reuse, adoption of hacker culture, of new forms of cooperation, in spheres other than the capitalist economy. Two, how a new concept could remove those limits and open up the possibilities for reuse. For that to happen, for new organizations to have a chance of being built on an adopted form of hacker culture, or for the existing ones to be rebuilt, to be hacked by it, we need a more precise definition of what is the hacker culture, or cultures.

As i have developed elsewhere, key attributes of the founding communities have been formalized best in the IETF and Free Software (Prug 2009). We could summarize them: one, a goal to create something that is shareable – making profit can only be a secondary goal. Two, open participation – anyone can join, based on enjoyment of work – and open processes and results of work. Three, core activity is base on volunteering, working groups and competence. Four, rough consensus and running code decision making principle is the norm, voting is used only in rare and extreme circumstances. Five, responsibilities are defined, to note some examples: for IETF it is protocol ownership, for FS software maintainer, for Debian GNU/Linux operating system package maintainer. Six, rights are based on contributions – in Open Organizations project, we called this implementation work (Geer, Malter, and Prug 2005). Roots of this principle are visible in the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club, the earliest hacker community we know of, where keys to the main room were given to new members, new hackers, only after they completed forty hours of work (Levy 1984, 21). Many authors also hold that having a trusted benevolent dictator is a key aspect(Coffin 2006), i do not share this view.

I proposed that we could describe the model in short with the following formula: the Internet Model = FS + IETF, software + networking, or ethics + organization.

My claim is that organizations implementing these processes would benefit in several ways. Structure and visibility of tasks, processes and work done to complete them will be clearer, which contributes to easier recognition of the workers who contribute most work that matters to the organization. As a result of this visibility, focus on implementation work and continuously carried out processes will increase, which keeps organization alive and developing. Project management will become easier, while decision making will be placed into the hands of those who matter most, who contribute most to the implementation work, work whose progress defines the organization and ensures its continual existence. All of this will attract new volunteers and reduce impact of the existing counter-productive internal participants. First attempt at a more detailed development of this model – set in a concrete, mostly cooperative production context – is in my paper Open Process Academic Publishing.

Today, given the structure of organizations across society, given our time based obligations to work place, and our waged labour, it is no surprise that it is difficult to see how could these new processes of work, this hacker culture, especially its volunteer aspect, be applicable. MySQL is one of the two most important Free Software databases, and one of the most used databases in the world. Sun, a large corporation founded in 1980-s also by an earlier generation of hackers, bought MySQL company in 2008. Two key MySQL hackers were unhappy with how the work was going under Sun, and they decided to leave and form their own company (Moody 2009). What differentiates them is a hacking business model (Greant and Widenius 2009) under which their new company operates: workers have wide array of rights derived from hacker culture, with a mixture of rules that seem to share some spirit of the self-management in Socialist Yugoslavia, combined with a typical capitalist company. This could be a one-off experiment. It could also be the start of a new generation of hackers financially empowered by their hacking, not ready any more to operate under the terms imposed on them by the form of capitalist firms that clash with hacker ethics and culture.

The Internet Model and the Open Process are attempts to conceptualize and appropriately name the ways of working which brought us the Internet and the Web. Ways in which hackers, academics and software and networking engineers, or the founding communities as i call them, played, and still play, a central, constitutive, role. Due to its focus on attracting capitalist investors under terms which included leaving many hacker culture features out, Open Source failed to be a concept through which a comprehensive reapplication of those ways of working across the rest of society would be possible. To make the reapplication possible, we need new concepts. Hence the Open Process and the Internet Model.

Open Source as a capitalist ideological castration

Adopting new terms for an important and widely spread concept is a difficult task. It does not help either that financial power behind Open Source and associated business interest is enormous. Public imagination was captured with the 2001 IBM announcement that they are investing 1000 million US dollars in Linux development. IBM was convinced that “Linux can do for business applications what the Internet did for networking and communications’, which will ‘make computing easier and free from proprietary operating systems’” (Wilcox 2000).

This type of business reaction was precisely what Open Source founders were looking for. In their open source “re-labelling”, their primary, publicly stated goal, was to attract business (Raymond 1998). To make hackers’ software and networking communities and their products look like a good place to invest vast sums of money. In short, Open Source was primarily a business pitch to the world’s largest IT corporations. We know that the goal of capitalist economic organizations is to make profit through exploitation and domination, through coercion of both workers and political organizations (lobbying, corruption).

Open Source initiative and for-profit organizations have been incredibly successful in appropriating only aspects of software and networking communities’ unique cooperation that suit them. However, every such appropriation is a closure of other possibilities. Given the dominance of capitalist relations, it is most often a removal of what does not fit its core logic of domination and exploitation for profit. Tracing the processes of these appropriations is necessary to evaluate what was left out, or added, to construct a capitalist, profit making suitable concept, like Open Source.

If we look at the various stages of cooperation in software and network communities, although many successful businesses were setup by the members of those communities, we will not see explicit claims, nor implicitly expressed desires, to make profit, nor to exploit or dominate. Quite the contrary, we can see claims to create, to be playful (Stallman 2002b; Levy 1984, 184, 202, 208), to do it with others, collectively  through open processes, open to both participation and with a shared final result (H. Alverstrand 2004). Although corporations have been integrating these elements as desirable aspects of work culture (Fleming 2009, 56-76), they are still not the attributes that would be welcome in a typical corporation, especially not in the Open Source founding days in 1998. This is why Open Source appropriation of this history, in its focus on attracting capital and top corporate decision makers, had to exclude elements unacceptable to for-profit capitalist model.

Since large scale controlled cooperation is the fundamental form of capitalist production (Marx 1990, 453-4), it was to be expected that aspects of the Internet Model will be attractive to capitalist organization of labour. When a business friendly subset, Open Source, was offered, a fast rate of adoption was a logical follow up.

A surprising result of this research which i did not foresee, was that Free Software principles, although central and far more truthful than Open Source to the Internet Model, still do not bode well enough on their own to describe innovative cooperation through which the Internet and its most important tools were built.

While the work of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) were one of the key components in the development of what i call the Internet Model, Open Source was an act of capitalist ideological castration. What was potent – what gave life to tools and practices of software and networking communities – was removed, in favour of commitment to the capitalist ideology.

The essential parts of that ideology are: time based wage labour; strictly hierarchical management with no say for those who do the implementation work (although, capitalism is trying to incorporate other models to adjust to what workers want while still have them obey); closed information, trade secrets, reward (wage) secrets; enforced (not volunteer) cooperation through closed processes; selfishness and strictly for-profit motivation; clash of inter-organizational limited open processes and cooperation (employees have to cooperate within the departments they work in) with overall selfishness, overall closed processes and for-profit motivation; active prevention of sharing of what could and should be shared in the name of private profit for the tiny minority (formulas to produce drugs for life threatening diseases being denied to poorer states are the best example), use of technology to increase machine-like time for humans (i.e Fordism with improved machinery and better control over humans in production). The list is long, and the contradictions between the necessary cooperation and non-cooperation are many.

All of the above characteristics are contrary to, and in clash with, many key aspects of the hacker culture. All of it had to be not mentioned, or obfuscated, in order for the Open Source initiative to sound right, sound true. But its truth lies only within the perspective of capitalism and especially within its neo-liberal free-market ideological doctrine. From the perspective of the hacker culture, capitalist ideology and its Open Source initiative, show the necessity of hacker politics.
However, as some might incorrectly conclude here from my remarks, the opposite is not directly true. A truth of hacker culture known to me cannot be easily identified nor placed within the politics of egalitarian ideologies and movements. Yet, there is a lot of shared ideological ground. Far more than it is the case with ideological forms of capitalism. Such comparison requires a separate study.

For now, i would like to point out that i believe that centralization, closeness and secrecy of socialist and communist practices were specific to the historic period in which they originated. The theoretical and ideological base from which these practices were derived from has many principles and beliefs similar to those exhibited in the hacker culture, and to an extent in hacker politics too – FS being an example of it. This was manifest in the socialist states, where sharing of education, health and housing were widely implemented. In socialist Yugoslavia, the principle of self-management brought the system a step closer to key elements of hacker culture.

I can imagine how a new generation of political principles and organizational tools for movements, activist and state forms, could be built consistently with vast majority of the Open Process and the Internet Model principles, with the hacker culture. A new hybrid political ideology, merging of anarchism and communism based on the technological advances of our time, seems a good candidate and a logical way to proceed. In other words, hacking, anarchism and communism could be the basis for a new directly democratic and participatory egalitarian society without strong centralized hierarchies, based on open processes and volunteer cooperation (enjoying work) at its core. A society with common needs and interests – developed in heterogeneous ways suitable to both diversity and commonness – at its centre. I cannot see how a similar ideological proximity, between hacking and capitalism, could be claimed for the forms of capitalist ideology.

A stolen method enabled false claims of uniqueness

There were two central differentiating points made by the Open Source founders. One, that their new concept was unique in making conscious the method of cooperation which was until then a set of customs passed through the practice, the so called ‘bazaar model’. Two, that they were pragmatists, not interested in ideology.

In the three-year study (2005-2008) of a new vast shopping mall, Shopsville in Finland, Murtola describes what happens when critique is appropriated into what is being critiqued. First step is exclusion, separation, “some people are allowed to join, they are specifically selected as appropriate. Others are denied access”. Main decision makers are investors, capital holders:

The process of appropriation can be understood as divided into two stages. The first stage involves choosing a selective, desired part of something and abstracting that part from its social and historical context. The second stage involves inserting it into another context.(Murtola, 15)

My claim is here the following: Richard Stallman’s Free Software foundational ethical principles were his expression of community of software engineers, academics, hackers, to produces collaboratively, voluntarily, without the coercive mechanisms of capital, a non-democratic force imposed on everyone since the days of the industrial revolution. He saw normal state of professional programming work where we do it for the money, wanting to get away from it and forget it as fast as possible, as a tragedy (Williams 2002, 77). Open Source did precisely what Murtola says happens through appropriation: they choose selectively, ignoring key aspects, ethics (FS) and open-process (IETF), extracting parts they selected from the overall social and historic context and embedding them into the new one suitable to capitalist investors.

Early versions of Emacs, Stallman’s earliest software, state that they were “distributed on a basis of communal sharing” (Williams 2002, 85). He found a way for an easy addition of features without disrupting the whole. He shared the source widely, inspiring large number of people to contribute. In words of Hal Abelson, one of Stallman’s colleagues from the time: in a robust structure loose network was collaborating successfully, with Stallman “paving the way for future large-scale collaborative software projects” unlike anything done before (Williams 2002, 86). John Gilmore, a prominent hacker, believes that through GNU project “Stallman pioneered collaborative development of software, particularly by disorganized volunteers who seldom meet each other”, and this may end up being his most important legacy (Williams 2002, 181).

Here we have precisely the invention of the method that Open Source initiative founders claimed differentiates their movement from Free Software. I guess because of open source initiative pressure, Stallman conceded that Open Source is a development methodology, while Free Software is a social movement with four essential freedoms (Stallman 2002a, 57). This, i claim, was a strategic mistake on Stallman’s part. It gave Open Source an advantage, through a false point of uniqueness that even for Raymond, if we read his texts closely, belonged at least as much to Stallman and older FS communities, as it did to a newer generation of hackers.

For Raymond, there were two broadly identifiable ideological positions amongst hackers, and variety of positions in between those two. First, one was ideological driven (FS), while the other one was pragmatist, not driven by an ideology (Raymond 2001, 67). Free Software was “historically the best organized and most visible part of hacker culture” (Raymond 2001, 68), since it

supported great deal of open-source development from 1980’s onward, including tools like Emacs and GCC which are still basic to the Internet open-source world, and seem likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. For many years the FSF was the single most important focus of open-source hacking, producing a huge number of tools still critical to the culture. The FSF was also long the only sponsor of open source with an institutional identity visible to outside observers of the hacker culture. (Raymond 2001, 69)

Note this well crafted ideological move: he calls everything open source couple of decades backwards, even though he is just in the process of inventing the term. Equally, he calls FSF a sponsor of open source, erasing from history that FSF supported Free Software, while implanting his fictitious construct that it supported open source, a non-existent term at the time. He continues: in July 1997, more than half of software in the largest and the most popular software archive in the world at the time carried FS General Public Licence (GPL). There were also pragmatist communities in 1980’s and 1990’s, mostly around Berkley Unix, users of BSD licence. However, they “failed to build bazaar communities of significant size, and became seriously fragmented and ineffective.”

In other words, Raymond agrees with widely held belief at the time: Free Software and its GPL copyleft way was a success, while what he calls a pragmatist approach was not. While explaining one of his “open source” principles (the importance of having users), Raymond used Emacs as a positive example of fast development in small cycles (Raymond 2001, 26-8). He thus confirmed what we knew already, as Abelson remarked, that frequent and early releases and cooperative development are models developed by Free Software communities. Yet, Raymond still proceeded and attributed falsely those features to his newly formed Open Source movement.

Emacs was and still is Free Software. Hence, features Raymond named and attributed to his newly founded movement, are the features of Free Software. Calling it something else, especially insisting that that else is based on methods of development invented by Free Software communities, is stealing and appropriating. In short, one of the key reasons why Free Software movement was successful is because it did well what Raymond stole from it and used it as his key argument to define Open Source: advanced methods of cooperation.

Raymond’s central point – point on which the whole reason for existence of Open Source hinges – the difference between the cathedral and bazaar model, is developed in a brief passage argued through Emacs as an example of cathedral style of development. He claimed that in 1992 he tried to merge large amount of Lisp libraries into Emacs, but he “run into political trouble and was largely unsuccessful” (Raymond 2001, 28). Stallman’s recollection of this was quite different. Raymond wanted to “take over the development of a large part of Emacs, operating independently”, while Stallman wanted to judge contributed ideas individually, accept some without being forced in accepting it all. This eventually led to Stallman “accepting substantial amount of Raymond’s work” (Wayner 2000, 113). For Raymond, this behaviour of Stallman was what made him characterize the development of Emacs as cathedral style, with a designer at the centre of the project.

With the appearance of Linux, a different, bazaar style of development appeared. However, Linus Torvalds’ style on which he insisted loudly and frequently on kernel email lists was that he will only apply small patches, that do one thing (Sowe and Stamelos 2007, 112). In other words, he was saying a very similar thing that Stallman told Raymond: changes have to be small, so that they can be selected easily by the project leader who made all the final decisions (Sowe and Stamelos 2007, 107). The process was almost identical, with one important difference: the frequency and pace of the application of incoming patches and releases was significantly, if not dramatically higher. Linus took the existing model and improved on it by speeding it up; this was his big contribution. Otherwise, very little else changed. Especially given that it is extremely rare that any software project attracts number of developers large enough to start functioning like the bazaar Raymond describes (Krishnamurthy 2002).

Distributed peer reviewing, add release early, release often, perhaps the two most important aspects claimed to have made Open Source unique (Raymond 2001), were aspects belonging to many hacker communities. Other than faster application of the cooperative model based on small patches, overall differences between the Free Software and Open Source was so small, that “as a development approach, the two F/OSS movements are indistinguishable” (Dedrick and West 2008, 436). Raymond’s Open Source was indeed a different political project, focused on dropping the GPL’s viral aspect and allowing corporations and institutions to keep their additions to the existing Free Software closed and not shared.

However, it was the invention of copyleft and GPL, work of FSF, and possibly most of all Stallman’s stubborn insistence on the importance of the key FS principles, which made aspects shared between the Free Software and Open Source widely spread and known.

With the rise of Linux, pragmatists finally had a success on their hands (Raymond 2001, 70). Even if this was the case, if Linux was a success of the pragmatist model, the model kept failing until that moment, as Raymond himself admitted comparing BSD’s relative failure, in comparison to GPL projects. Moreover, if so, surely those times, the history before Linux, were successful because of the Free Software, as Raymond also noted. Hence, it is a blatant misrepresentation to call it what it was not, Open Source. However, there is little doubt that success of the Linux kernel and the GNU/Linux system, and subsequent Open Source marketing supported by ultra rich corporations, made some aspects of hacker culture and model of cooperation far more prominent.

It is incorrect to call the project a “rebranding exercise” of Free Software in Open Source (Moody 2001, 169). In rebranding, the brand changes in a given moment of time by those, in most cases who own it, while history is preserved. There is no negation of the previous brand, only the introduction of a new one. In rebranding, history is not rewritten. Finally, to start with, you need to have a brand. Free Software was never a brand. Brands are ways to market, categorize, position, and sell commodities, ways to limit the use of collection of attributes which constitute the brand, in other to make profit. Free Software was, and still is, a social movement. It came out of hacking communities, based on hacking culture.

Core hacking values do not fit in the for-profit, capitalist ideology and practice. Hence, Raymond and his group had to start from stripping attributes that do not fit, in order to have an object that can both fit capitalism and be commodified. Only such, new and suitable concept, could have been branded. Raymond created this new concept by rewriting and falsifying the history of Free Software. He negated it first through the creation of a new, hostile concept. He then proceeded to call its history, its products, methods and communities with a new name. The circle was complete. It was an act of ethical cleansing: it cleansed the community formed under the new concept from Free Software hackers and their ethics.

On practice and ideology

Open Source creation was not just a creation of a new concept. It was an extensively conceived project, and Raymond who took central part in it has shown to be a successful ideologue. Rejecting that the notion of ideology applies to you is a typical attribute of an ideology and an ideologue. Raymond’s beliefs are with free trade and forces of the market, which are, according to him, both opposed to coercion through ideology (Moody 2001, 153). There are two mistaken basic theoretically assumptions here. One, that there is non-ideological set of beliefs and practices (Žižek 1994, 17). And two, that free-trade and market forces are those non-ideological entities. Ian Murdoch, founder of Debian project, expressed similar neo-liberal ideological views:

“commoditization is a natural and unstoppable force that is good for everyone involved if that force is allowed to develop on its natural course” (DiBona, Stone, and Cooper 2005, 92).

These claims might have stood in the eyes of many prior to the 2008 banking crashes. However, it is clear now that it is only through the gigantic and swift state intervention that the capitalist financial sector has been saved from a total collapse. Let us be clear on this: Alister Darling, UK minister of finance at the time, spoke openly for the first time about the seriousness of the crisis in the summer of 2009. On that weekend in 2008, we were forty-eight hours away from the two of the four largest UK banks closing down its cash points and declaring bankruptcy [REF]. The state had no choice, but to intervene and pump as much money as it was needed to prevent this. No one, not to my knowledge, has spoken on the possible consequences of two largest banks closing down on a Monday morning, with no cash to be withdrawn. Can you at all imagine such situation? Do you believe that the population of UK would have remained civil and peaceful to each other in the face of a large percentage of population having their current accounts locked out? For one, i do not. I believe the army would have been on the streets, and UK would have entered a period of civil unrest with unimaginable consequences.

Neo-liberal free-markets were never free. Any meticulous student of neo-liberalism not entirely taken by its ideology would have discovered this. In the year 2008 the whole world had a gigantic proof that free-markets were entirely dependent on the acts of states to develop, nurture and bail them out when necessary. Unregulated, left to their own freedoms, markets – lead by the financial one where innovation in products and trading schemes originated – developed into an enormous danger to the entire society. Rightly, citizens’ trust in them worldwide has collapsed (Globescan 2009).

It is through emphasis on practice, entirely based on the methodology appropriated from Free Software and other communities of hackers, that Raymond states his claim. Here is how he described Richard Stallman’s work:

In 1985, RMS published the GNU Manifesto. In it he consciously created an ideology out of the values of the pre-1980 ARPANET hackers — complete with a novel ethico-political claim, a self-contained and characteristic discourse, and an activist plan for change. RMS aimed to knit the diffuse post-1980 community of hackers into a coherent social machine for achieving a single revolutionary purpose. His behavior and rhetoric half-consciously echoed Karl Marx’s attempts to mobilize the industrial proletariat against the alienation of their work.(Raymond 2004, 69)

In short, Stallman created a ideology. While Raymond and his group did not:

“Open source” was explicitly intended to replace Stallman’s preferred “free software” with a public label that was ideologically neutral, acceptable both to historically opposed groups like the BSD hackers and those who did not wish to take a position in the GPL/anti-GPL debate.(Raymond 2004, 74)

What we have according to Raymond is ideology (FS) versus ideology neutral (OS). However, when he states, “for me, the working method is the ideology” (Moody 2008), he exposes one side of the broken logic of his claim bare. If, as Raymond claims, methodology is central to Open Source, and methodology is ideology, Open Source is not ideology neutral. Its ideology is, as he says, methodology. Hence, by his own logic, Free Software and Open Source would be just two ideological concepts and communities. Free Software would be an ethico-political ideology, while Open Source would be ideology based purely on methodology of work.

However, as i demonstrated above, the claim of being methods based is false. Methods were developed and made widely popular and successful largely by the Free Software movement, Open Source appropriated it. Hence, not only is Raymond’s key claim about ideology (FS) versus ideology neutral (OS) untrue, its starting points are false too. In other words, he did not even have a coherent starting point. The only thing that is unique to the Open Source group is their approach to capitalism, their embrace of free-market ideology.

It is thus not a surprise, but rather another confirmation of capitalist ideology as the only valid point in Open Source, that interviewees did not care about either Free Software (freedom, community, sharing) or Open Source (methods) ideas, and instead based their decision mostly on the low-cost aspect and freedom from vendor lock-in (Campbell-Kelly and Garcia-Swartz 2009). Authors’ mistaken view, which destroys the possibility of a more useful analytical development of their research, is to contrast ideology with pragamatism. This is typical of liberal notion of ideology, one found in liberal political science textbooks, in which capitalism is naturalized, and in which acting according to the rules of a capitalist firm, or a government agency, is not seen as ideological. Socialist firms and government agencies in Yugoslavia, and most importantly the overall relation between the producer and consumer, had a lot in common with capitalist firm and forms of government, which perhaps explains a rapid conversion to the consumption model of the free market:

But what constituted the failure on behalf of the socialist project was that it rehearsed the divorce between the productivity and consumption in the subjectivity (differentiation between worker and consumer otherwise also known as alienation of producer from his products) and the mediation between them via the process of abstraction and mediation by means of the general equivalent the same way the capitalist project did. In this regard it remained tributary of the capital relation and consequently was essentially deserving of the name it got – state-capitalism. (Medak 2004)

The point Medak make is a crucial one: Free Software offers an intervention into the main nodes of the capitalist production (alienation of labour and circulation of commodities via abstraction of money – all of this free of ideology, according to liberal theorists), perhaps better than socialist state projects from the last century did. Which does not diminish their importance, it merely points out one of possible key causes for their failure, and possible path of development of new egalitarian political projects.

Aside with this brief excursion, Raymond is incapable of holding his own constructs logically coherent. The above is one example, there are plenty of others scattered across his texts. Another example is that he saw BSD communities as a pragmatist opposition that rejected GNU’s ideological primacy (Raymond 2004, 71). However, they became included in his Open Source concept, through inclusion of method of work, as a part of the Open Source success story, as an essential argument for construction of the Open Source movement. Again, if ideology is method, and GNU was ideological, as Raymond claims, GNU’s methods were more successful as ideology. Hence, it made no logical sense to include BSD communities under a newly formed Open Source concept as an example of the success of the pragmatist model. It was the GPL, copyleft and the FS movement model that were a success, and not BSD, as Raymond himself wrote on occasions. It gets very confusing and it is difficult to follow.

For Raymond, with his creation of Open Source, communities that objected to FS and GPL, like BSD, which were not successful in comparison with FS and GPL successes, suddenly became important because they fitted his pragmatist category.

Regarding the main pragmatist success story, Linux, Linus Torvalds might have been, and still is, a person who does not agree with Richard Stallman’s firm stance on Free Software principles, but he nevertheless choose them, and still sticks by them, through his use of GPL license. Perhaps pragmatically so, but it demonstrates the efficiency of the Free Software cooperative, ethical and licensing models, and the degree of success of its ideology. As early as 1995, Torvalds openly expressed that he uses and likes proprietary software that gets the job done better (Williams 2002, 157). Regardless of this admission, and his open dislike of Stallman’s hard stance, Torvalds clearly understands that he would not have been able to even start his Linux project, if there was no GNU project tools and libraries, ethics, licensing and Stallman’s unfettered belief in all of it.

Finally, it was people from these pragmatist BSD-license communities, many of them coming from Berkeley, that sometimes “shared by selling the software back to these students and the taxpayers who had paid for their work”. Sun was one of the companies that profited from such privatization of socially funded development (Wayner 2000, 96, 132). So did Microsoft, although quietly and without any commitment to such model (Adamba 2001). This is another feature in line with the neo-liberal ideology of socializing the cost of developing (arms and pharmaceutical industries), while privatizing profits [REF].

Splitting the community: top-down, corporate exclusion of Free Software hackers and their ideals

The key event for the birth of the Open Source was the release of Netscape browser source code. It was a desperate last attempt by a company whose market share was being crushed by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Michael Tiemann explained how Netscape move inspired foundation of the Open Source Initiative: “we decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with ‘free software’ in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape.” (Tiemann 2008) In his first announcement to the community, after consultations with a number of interested companies and individuals, Raymond issued the call to arms “Goodbye, ‘free software’; hello, ‘open source’”, in which he stated two problems with Free Software. First, it is confusing and ambiguous, since it is unclear whether free means no money charged, or free to be modified by anyone. Second:

it makes a lot of corporate types nervous [...] we now have a pragmatic interest in converting these people  [...] a chance we can make serious gains in the mainstream business world without compromising our ideals and commitment to technical excellence — so it’s time to reposition. We need a new and better label. We suggest that everywhere we as a culture have previously talked about “free software”, the label should be changed to “open source”. Open-source software. The open-source model. The open source culture. (Raymond 1998)

Here we have a series of implicit statements, present from the logic of the text. The key operation Open Source founders executed was getting rid of Free Software ethical principles. If such operation is done “without compromising our” ideals, that implies that Free Software hackers cannot be included in “our”. In other words, Open Source initiative was exclusion of all Free Software hackers who held Free Software ethical ideals. This was never publicly stated, of course, it would have caused an outrage if Raymond came out with such statement. Effectively, he did say it. He just expressed it in a subtle way that required a bit of analysis to render it visible.

Exclusion of all Free Software hackers and their ideals was not just symbolized, but also practically done through the exclusion of Richard Stallman from Open Source founding events (Williams 2002, 165). Tim O’Reilly recalls that at the meeting where a new name was decided on, they voted, and decided to all stick with the Open Source, which got 9 out of 15 votes. This was for O’Reilly “a solidarity message” (Williams 2002, 164). How bizarre! This was solidarity. What about Stallman and large Free Software communities that Stallman’s views were representative of? It certainly was not in any sort of solidarity with them. They were excluded from the start, together with the central ideas on which the communities were built on. Equally important, such strategy was in total opposition with the most fundamental of all Inter Engineering Task Force (IETF) cardinal principles: open process, according to which “any interested person can participate in the work, know what is being decided, and make his or her voice heard on the issue” (IETF, Request for Comments 3935, 2004).

In short, Open Source was a betrayal of volunteer driven open collaboration of software and networking communities in several ways. Apart from betraying the ethics of Free Software and excluding entire large communities of hackers, and apart from betraying the IETF principle of open process, being strictly motivated by the financial rewards derived from the vast investments in the field was another betrayal. Eric Raymond dismissed financial motivation (Raymond 1999). His dismissal is absurd. Not only did he rose from a fringe software hacker to the status of a rich (a millionaire many times over) celebrity, but Open Source was an explicit, clearly stated call for capitalist investors to put their money into this narrow subset of the Internet Model.

Raymond and many others were rewarded by Open Source business co-conspirators with share allocations, once some of the first Open Source companies floated on the stock market and became worth tens, some hundreds, of millions of dollars over night (Moody 2001, 235-6). This stands in stark contrast with the detail from the spring 2000, when Eben Moglen paid a lunch for himself and Stallman, knowing that he was the only one who had some money to pay for it (Williams 2002, 184).

We can speculate what was the extent of the impact of Open Source pleasing investors on the overall phenomena known as the dot-com bubble. However, we can broadly say that Raymond and Open Source founders played an active part in inflated expectations leading to one of the largest financial crashes since the 1930’s crisis, superseded only by the recent financial crisis.

Following statements, from different books and times, show how subtle, clever and thoroughly ideological, Open Source move was:

My impression at the time was that he (Linus Torvalds) had those conclusions as latent knowledge, but that I was causing the knowledge to be-come explicit in his mind. So I think that when he read my draft, he essentially consciously discovered what he already knew. (Moody 2001, 152) [...] The one thing Torvalds did not offer was a new ideology, a new rationale or positive generative myth of hacking (Raymond 2004, 49) [...]  You can view it as a continuation of a theme that’s been present in my work all along, which is the conscious elucidation of unconscious knowledge (Moody 2001, 153).

Here we have Raymond uncovered as a mature, clever, respectable ideolog, explicitly defining himself as one who creates ideology for the new movement, in contrast to his early claims that FS is ideological, while OS is neutral, pragmatic. The most efficient ideological moves, or perhaps we can say the only properly ideologically ones, are those that are not false, whose content is truthful. What makes them ideological is what they leave out, what they do not tell us, in order to both hide some existing domination (power-over) and exploitation, and to justify such relation as valid, logical, and acceptable (Žižek 1994, 7-9). This is a simpler form of ideological operation.

What we get from Raymond in the above quote is a more complex move. Not only does he cut out Free Software ethics and hackers and some other key Internet Model collaborative principles, he insists that what he does is only an act of elucidation of what was already an existing unconscious knowledge. He thus puts the responsibility and justification for his ideological move (his creation of a new community, exclusions, betrayals and strictly financial motivations) not on the acts of Open Source founders and his leadership, but he instead projects it onto the internal, personal, psychology of those who accept the new concept and accept being followers of this new community.

The precision by which he expresses this move is striking. As we know from Žižek’s portrayal of Donal Rumsfeld as a philosopher, in the matrix of four possible states of the known/unknown, it is the unknown-known, a combination that Rumsfeld did not mention, that matters most (Žižek 2004, 95). This is the definition of the unconscious: stuff that we do know, but we are not aware that we know it. Raymond stuffed his entire creation into the unconscious, pulling it out of it like a magician pulling the rabbit out of the black hat. Most likely, unaware, or shall we say unconscious?, of the trick he pulled. Here we are, happy to oblige. The trick, after all, was not that great. Raymond misrepresentation of history continues:

“Before The Cathedral and the Bazaar, open-source development was a folk practice, a set of working methods evolved unconsciously by hackers who had no theory about why the things they were doing actually worked. It didn’t have a name—and no, “free software” wasn’t it, because that label was about ideology and goals rather than working methods and communications structures.” (Moody 2008)

As we have seen from Raymond’s claims analysed earlier in the text, these are entirely false claims. His work was all about a new ideology and new goals, as much as work of Free Software communities prior to his Open Source project was about working methods and communication structures. Ideological framing is unsurprisingly present in the official document, History of OSI:

“The prehistory of the Open Source Initiative includes the entire history of Unix, Internet free software, and the hacker culture. OSI was formed as an educational, advocacy, and stewardship organization at a cusp moment in the history of the culture.” (Tiemann 2008)

Suddenly, once the move of the exclusion through the splitting of the community is forgotten, excluded are back, as a supporting argument to the claim that the Open Source Initiative, the main organisation behind the Open Source, includes the entire history of software and networking engineering and hacking communities.

Discussions on a Debian GNU/Linux email lists at the time reveal more about the way Open Source came into life and the schism it caused. Dissatisfaction with the way Raymond was leading the OSI project was so high, that a formal proposal was made for Software For Public Interest (SPI), a Debian umbrella organization, to take over the OSI (Carter 1999). Most of criticism focused on secrecy, lack of community involvement and opaque communication and decision making, all features contrary to the way hackers, and especially project like Debian, operate (Towns 1999; Perens 1999; Schuessler 1999). A discussion continued clarifying the role of OSI to sit between suits (corporate capital) and hackers, asking for “some formal procedures”.

The strongest condemnation of the OSI way of working came in clear terms: “The ‘Open Software Initiative’ is a CLOSED organization. That’s damn near to hypocrisy” (Brinkmann 1999). In the same fascinating thread, the difference between the hackers and business way was boldly stated:

> Admitting your mistakes, your bugs, your design flaws,
> whatever is a key element of free software development.

You are absolutely right. That is how hackers do things. It’s
completely lacking in a business environment. If we were to be seen
as hackers, we would get the same regard that hackers have always
gotten: zero.

An angry response followed, stating that Brinkmann does not understand the job they, OSI, have to do, which is to negotiate licences in secrecy, because that, doing it closed, is the nature of how it is done: there is no time for open participation of the community (Nelson 1999a). Because of Nelson’s unfriendly response, another member suggests that this type of response is the reason why SPI should get the control over the Open Source (Winebarger 1999a).

Nelson defends, since OSI has been doing all of the work on Open Source, it hence owns it: “In my universe, those who do the work get to own it” (Nelson 1999b). Same Nelson who just insisted that hacker principles of community, cooperation, dialogue, openness, cannot be withheld, since that is not how you can operate in the business environment (with suits). You have to adjust to their language, not listen to, nor cooperate closely with your hacker community any more, but adopt negotiations in secrecy instead. Yet, when he was challenged about the ownership of the work, Nelson went back to his hacker beliefs and chose to own the work because he was doing it.

However, why would the ownership of the work done with “suits” be allocated according to hacker rules, and why not according to the rules of “suits”, following Nelson’s own way of accepting the business rules over the rules of his community on whose behalf he was acting? According to business rules, the work belongs to those who pay for it, or who have more resources to command the situation, to assert their rule. Nelson’s inconsistency was in line with Raymond’s texts and claims: they both used or discarded hacker ethics selectively, as it suited them. Which is a remarkably fast adoption to how corporations think and act: nothing is sacred, and everything is allowed as long as you are not caught, all in the name of profit. Even when a corporation, or large parts of an entire sector, are caught, as the 2008 financial crisis shows, if your corporation is large and important enough, the state will jump in and cover for your losses.
This discussion on Debian mailing lists showed the extent to which the corporate capitalist ethic was in clash with the hacker ethic, and Raymond’s and Nelson’s troubles to operate between the two ethical systems demonstrate their incompatibility. Nelson got another striking response stating the incompatibility between suits and hackers:

“It may be that the “suits” can identify with a highly closed operation, but the free software community is much more democratic, and its members (I’ve found) tend to be more freedom-concious than average. Backroom dealings might be acceptable as necessary, but without accountability, that acceptance is likely to be low to none” (Winebarger 1999b).

This crisis between OSI and Debian arose around the Apple licence claims to be an Open Source one. It brought to the surface differences between OSI licence processes too. Another user reminded that the Nestscape Public Licence (NPL) went through precisely the process Nelson claims is impossible: it was done through a newsgroup that anyone can join, and amongst many discussions, Richard Stalman, Bruce Perens and Netscape employees discussed issues concerning the licence. Several NPL/MPL drafts were circulated in the process, and while the starting licence was not Free Software, final draft was. Although there were many private conversations between Perens, Raymond and Netscape, there was “also an *open* public process”, and the community of Free Software, have the right to insist on such mandatory open process (Pennington 1999). The day later, Nelson announces that OSI board made a decision to decide on all licences through an open, public, mailing list (Nelson 1999c). Community pressure did have some effect on this occasion.

Not surprisingly, Richard Stallman saw the Apple License in a completely different light than Open Source founders did:

Overall, I think that Apple’s action is an example of the effects of the year-old “open source” movement: of its plan to appeal to business with the purely materialistic goal of faster development, while putting aside the deeper issues of freedom, community, cooperation, and what kind of society we want to live in.

Apple has grasped perfectly the concept with which “open source” is promoted, which is “show users the source and they will help you fix bugs”. What Apple has not grasped–or has dismissed–is the spirit of free software, which is that we form a community to cooperate on the commons of software. (Stallman 1999)

In a response to it, Craig Sander wrote:

i think it is worth pointing out here that the rapid bug-fixing and development of features is merely a side-effect of this spirit of free software. i.e. it is *because* we know that the software is free and can never be taken away from us, and *because* we know we are contributing to the common good that we are willing to volunteer our time and energy and skills to improving free software.

without that security of knowledge, why should we bother? we would be better off putting our time and energy into something which was truly free than putting it into something which may be taken away from us in the future.
free software is, IMO, an example of enlightened self-interest – we are helping others by helping ourselves, and making an investment in software “infrastructure” which will benefit us all for decades (or more) to come. (Sanders 1999)

What Sanders refers to, talking about the software infrastructure which will benefit us for decades, is, a form of commons, a form of wealth and resource available to all, yet belonging exclusively to no one. The enlightened self-interest – which liberals might equate with the notions of individual rights and legal system to protect those, primarily the right to property – is here translated into the common of software. The right to property takes away the collective product created within organizations and asserts the ownership of it by the organization and individuals who own it, thus removing the ability of workers to have any say in it; they have nothing beyond the wage they receive for the labour they sell. This right of owners of capital and of means of production to claim ownership and hence further destiny over what is collectively (every company) produced is closely guarded by the state and laws. Free Software, and the spirit shown in the reaction to the creation of the capitalist Open Source movement is the spirit of non-alienated workers who feel and understand the value of non-alienated, commonly utilized and managed production. The production of the commons. Free Software movement refuses to put aside ‘the deeper issues of freedom, community, cooperation’, and most important, the question of ‘what kind of society we want to live in’. Richard Stallman’s words that proponents of Open Source do not grasp the spirit of Free Software, ‘which is that we form a community to cooperate on the commons of software’, are succinctly stated basis on which we can read Free Software and its hacker communities as a a form of communist spirit, one which becomes more visible in the clask with the capitalist counter-revolutionary acts of Open Source ideologues. Not communist as in the communist state projects or communist political parties of the twentieth century – these were only the forms that the idea of communism took in the past century – but communist in the spirit of the core ideas of communism. It is not for no reason that community is a root word for the ideas assigned to the concept of communism. The desires expressed by Stallman, of workers to take control over the product of their work, and most importantly, of the type of communities they form to cooperate in order to create a form of commons (and not to earn individually split profit), are deeply communist ideas.

The history of industry and commerce (in software and knowledge production) is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces (hackers, Open Access and Open Process in academia) against modern conditions of production (Fordism in software, Java, factory production-line type of division of labour, precariousness in education), against the property relations (copyright, patenting software) that are the conditions for the existence of the (software) bourgeois and of its rule. The productive forces at the disposal of society (the cooperation of the multitude, in Hardt/Negri terms, or simply volunteer cooperation of communities of knowledge and affect workers) no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters (as soon as the multitude becomes political, although hackers and education workers are already engaged in the struggle within the production), they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property (the new commons: shared software, knowledge, arts, even shared recipes for medical drugs). The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented. The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground (communication and knowledge industries) are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself (Marx and Engels 2005, 225-6).

The above paragraph is entirely a quote from the Communist Manifesto, with my comments that bring it to our moment in time placed in brackets.

Free Software and hackers, and their originating environment, education institutions, are the productive forces most intensely involved in the production of new commons. Their impulse to share globally, to be leaders in the decommodification of the knowledge and important type of means of production (software), to be at the forefront of the creation of new commons, is a communist, at minimal commonist, impulse. What could make it communist, is the creation of new political subjectivity, based on rethinking of the idea of communism and the organizational capabilities of the multitude (which for  me slightly, but significantly, differs from the concept developed by Hardy/Negri; to be developed elsewhere)  today, one that would be capable of expressing and developing new commons as a political project. It is here that we’re faced with some of the limits of Marx’s analysis for our contemporary moment:

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.

This does not resonate with the situation today. Despite numerous efforts to squeeze our situation today into Marx’s framework, we do not have anything closely resembling the working class, or the proletarians. That excludes small left parties, who still try to forcefully bend reality and shove it into Marx’s concepts, rather than write useful theory to extend and patch up where Marx theoretically failed, or where he stopped. Instead, the closest we have is the theoretical framework of the Multitude. Yet, Hardt/Negri concept is still in its pre-political, or early political, phase. Although their Commonwealth book patches up some if it (more on this in the next part), it still lacks enough of common language to speak about both the subjects and the objects of a new communism, or new communisms. Most important, it lacks the organizational framework to take us beyond the retarded party system which both Hardt/Negri and Badiou (2008) reject.

We need a new, hacked communism. A philosophy and a science for the new commons, and a new globally egalitarian political language and practices. Open Process is an attempt to think this problem aloud. As comrade Žižek said wisely in his interview for the BBC2 TV The Culture Show recently, the future will be red. Either from the flames of hell, or the flags of communism. “SEE YOU IN HELL, or IN COMMUNISM!”? Either way, the future is bright. Bright red.

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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 [...]]]>

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:

Asay, Matt. 2009. “When open source isn’t (open enough).” CNET News. Available at: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10394478-16.html?tag=mncol;posts [Accessed November 11, 2009].

Bousquet, Marc. 2008. How the university works : higher education and the low-wage nation. New York: New York University Press.

Brown, Wendy. 2005. Edgework : critical essays on knowledge and politics. Princeton  N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Coleman, Gabriella. 2009. “CODE IS SPEECH: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open Source Software Developers.” Cultural Anthropology 24(3): 420-454.

DiBona, Chris, Mark Stone, and Danese Cooper. 2005. Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution. O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Franceschet, Massimo. 2010. “PageRank: Stand on the shoulders of giants.” 1002.2858. Available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2858 [Accessed February 22, 2010].

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. 1st ed. Harvard University Press.

Howard, Tony. 2008. “The Legal Framework Surrounding
Patents for Living Materials.” In Patenting Lives: Life Patents, Culture and Development (Intellectual Property, Theory and Culture), Ashgate, p. 9-24.

Lee, Gwendolyn K., and Robert Cole. “From a Firm-Based to a Community-Based Model of Knowledge Creation: The Case of the Linux Kernel Development.” Organization Science, Vol. 14, No. 6, pp. 633-649, 2003. Available at: http://ssrn.com/paper=950262 [Accessed October 30, 2009].

Lowe, Janet. 2009. Google speaks : secrets of the world’s greatest billionaire entrepreneurs, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Hoboken  N.J.: John Wiley & Sons.

Moody, Glyn. 2001. Rebel Code: Linux and The Open Source Revolution. The Penguin Press.

National Research Council USA. 1999. Funding a revolution : government support for computing research. Washington  D.C.: National Academy Press.

Negri, Antonio. 2004. Negri on Negri. New York: Routledge.

Pasquinelli, Matteo. 2008. Extract from Animal Spirits a Bestiary of the Commons. matteo pasquinelli. Available at: http://www.generation-online.org/c/fc_rent4.pdf.

Prug, Toni. 2007. “Hacking ideologies, part 2: Open Source, a capitalist movement.” In 24c3 Tagungsband Volldampf voraus!, Berlin, Germany: Art d’Ameublement. Available at: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2311.en.html.

Rieder, Bernhard. 2008. “Democratizing Search.” Available at: http://world-information.org/wii/deep_search/en/program [Accessed November 18, 2009].

Save the University: Wendy Brown, Part 6. 2009. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR4xYBGdQgw&feature=youtube_gdata [Accessed November 11, 2009].

Stallman, Richard. 2009. “The GNU Manifesto.” Available at: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html [Accessed November 16, 2009].

Stutz, David. 2004. “The Natural History of Software Platforms.” Available at: http://www.synthesist.net/writing/software_platforms.html [Accessed October 31, 2009].

Vasile, James. 2009. “Hack the System.” Hacker Visions. Available at: http://hackervisions.org/?p=447 [Accessed February 19, 2010].

Wark, McKenzie. 2004. A Hacker Manifesto. Harvard University Press.

Wayner, Peter. 2000. Free for all : how Linux and the free software movement undercut the high-tech titans. 1st ed. New York: Harper Business.

Wessner, Charles, and National Research Council USA. 2003. Securing the future regional and national programs to support the semiconductor industry. Washington  D.C.: National Academies Press.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. The Parallax View. MIT Press.

Here’s an idea that that is part of the proposal for one of the journals i’m working with on implementing aspects of open-process in academic publishing: a different way to deal with topics important to a journal is to replace the concept of special issues, with the concept of research threads.

In short: research threads are  [...]]]>

Here’s an idea that that is part of the proposal for one of the journals i’m working with on implementing aspects of open-process in academic publishing: a different way to deal with topics important to a journal is to replace the concept of special issues, with the concept of research threads.

In short: research threads are  more suitable (more open, inclusive and more likely to result in higher quality submissions) to the dynamics of work of academic researchers than special issues.

I find that calls for special issues annoy me often, since i frequently  find the ones i like, but cannot interrupt what i am at that moment  working on and write for the special issue, although the topic intrigues  me, and i’d love to write on it in near future (happened to me twice only in the past few months). I know i’m not alone in this ambiguous feeling toward special issues, few other colleagues i spoke to have the same problems.

Here’s the reasoning: a call for special issues often goes out 9-12 months in advance, sometimes longer. By the time an author hears about it, the author can be faced with few months until the deadline – this frequently seems to be the case – unless authors is already part of circles through which she/he will get informed directly (this also seems to be the pattern). Researching and writing a good academic article requires several months, often much longer. By the current dynamics of special issues, many authors that do think they have something to contribute and are willing to write on the topic, end up missing the opportunity to write and submit.

From the reader perspective, Special Issues are more of collection of articles of existing clusters/mini-networks of academics, rather then collections of best work that is being done on the given topic at given moment in time.

I don’t believe that special issues, as a form, are suitable any more for the best possible production of knowledge.

Instead, i propose a model of RESEARCH THREADS, with two distinct features:

1) deadlines are minimum of two, perhaps even three years ahead;

2) submitted articles are published within a research thread as soon as they are accepted and peer reviewed, in order to present new research as soon as possible, to make the research thread alive and to not make authors wait for a long time before their accepted article gets published.

I speculate that research threads primary benefit would be higher quality of submissions from wider range of academics.

Additional possible benefits:

a) no need any more to have special issues waiting in a queue;

b) several parallel research threads running simultaneously would give the journal a distinct identity and a sense of constant development through the current research threads;

c) clusters of researchers with common interests might be formed through this more open and wider participatory model