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.
[...read more...]
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.
[...read more...]
This page is wiki editable click here to edit this page.
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.
[...read more...]
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.
[...read more...]
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
|
|
