News! This post is the beginning of a book club series about Chris Kelty’s Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (PDF available here). The participants include Tim Hwang (fabulousbitches.org), Diana Kimball (dianakimball.com), Christina Xu (spreadtoothin.wordpress.com), and Alex Leavitt (alexleavitt.com). And if you have feedback/responses/tangents/epiphanies/criticisms/examples related to the book, blog them or use the comment system over at twobits.net.–we’re all about modulation here at the 2-Bit Processor Project. Any reactions to my interpretation/modulation are more than welcome (perhaps even encouraged?) in the comments or in the venue of your choice.
I should mention that Christina, Tim, and I were fortunate enough to take a class with Professor Kelty last fall. It was called “The History of Software and Networks” and was offered in the History of Science department at Harvard last fall. Kelty also attended ROFLCon last April, where he moderated the famously awesome Internet Cult Leaders panel. He’s a professor of anthropology at Rice and, if it isn’t apparent by now, something of a rock star. The book is the culmination of years of fieldwork and research in the worlds of Free Software, geekdom, and the Internet, and needless to say we’re all pretty excited about it.
OK, so now that all of the introductory business is out of the way, onto the book itself. Today’s post is going to be fairly general, discussing some of Two Bits’s basic premises and concepts and seeing how far we can take them at this point. That said, the introduction is by no means an “easy” section–in fact it may be one of the most challenging in the book. If you are interested in reading the whole thing, I recommend re-reading the introduction when you’re done with the rest–I found the second pass to be very illuminating.
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Basically, what we’re dealing with here is Free Software and its cultural significance (What’s that? You didn’t read that in the title of the book?). Now “Free Software” is not an easy term to define by any means, as five seconds spent at the Free Software Foundation’s website clearly illustrates. In fact, I’m fairly sure these are issues over which much blood has been shed–especially now that Richard Stallman has a katana. Kelty wisely avoids that can of worms by instead identifying five components essential to Free Software by any definition–even though the practices behind these components can vary widely depending on the specific implementation of “free software” (page 13).
What’s key here is that Free Software is treated as a practice and, what’s more, a practice that isn’t limited to software. In Kelty’s words, “Free Software is no longer only about software—it exemplifies a more general reorientation of power and knowledge” (page 2). Indeed, software and networks, “tools of creation and circulation” are growing ever more accessible, and bringing with them the ability for further emulation of the practices of Free Software. This is where it gets particularly interesting for me–that is to say, with the introduction of a technological backbone for a novel social practice.
The theory behind Kelty’s analysis of the practice of Free Software may also the most challenging aspect of the introduction–if not of the entire book). This difficult concept is that of the ‘recursive public.’ The concept, as I understand it, is a subtle combination of two fairly straightforward observations. First, there are certain social practices that rely on technological and legal infrastructures to maintain their existence. Second, there are publics with a vested and explicit interest in maintaining themselves and the infrastructures on which they depend. These ‘recursive publics’ are constantly debating over, modifying, and speculating on the structures beneath them–in essence, they work on maintaining themselves on every “layer” of the system. As you might have guessed, Free Software hackers form such a public, and so too do those groups that emulate the practices of Free Software.
Even at this early stage in the book, there’s a lot that is useful for my particular interest. One thought in Kelty’s introduction stands out as being especially enlightening for my project. That is:
There are explanations aplenty for why things are the way they are: it’s globalization, it’s the network society, it’s an ideology of transparency, it’s the virtualization of work, it’s the new flat earth, it’s Empire. We are drowning in the why, both popular and scholarly, but starving for the how. (Two Bits, x)
However, there is one aspect of modernity that Kelty zeroes in on that is of the utmost importance: the orientation of power and knowledge is changing. Of course, such an assertion will not be everywhere accepted, but assuming that it is true, it casts recursive publics in an interesting light. An individual who gets large quantities of information off of wikipedia is most certainly involved in the “reorientation of power and knowledge,” but an individual who also contributes information, debates over guidelines, and enters the community is steering and developing the reorientation of power and knowledge.
For this reason, a recursive public cannot be as passive an actor in the “why” of modernity and Kelty seems to suggest. I would argue that as they become more prominent, they become ever more involved in the change. Indeed, such a public would be acting at once at both base and superstructure! In a Marxian reading of Kelty, one may interpret the layers of the Internet as being moving from the most base (the physical layer), to the most superstructural (content), and thus be able to interpret the actions of recursive publics as being active in all these realms.
This is not to expand the role of the Internet to occupy the whole realm of structure–even if talking solely about networks there are further “structural” issues to consider such as the digital divide–but it is most certainly an aspect of structure (speaking as one inclined to view technology as being of the utmost importance to Marx’s view of history). Thus recursive publics won’t likely be changing the course of history in a strictly Marxian sense, but they are very explicitly aware of the implications of policy and innovation on every level–an awareness that I believe would grant them a substantial amount of agency.
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The upcoming chapters explore ethnographic work into geekdom, the history of Free Software and the practices that comprise it, and other implementations of such practices. Read them if you can, and stop back here and around my various affiliates for commentary, modulation, and general awesomeness.
Also, in an upcoming post not directly related to this one, I hope to elaborate more on my interpretation of Marx and technology as it relates to my project, ideally incorporating some of my thoughts here if I still think that they make sense in the morning.
Oh, and the cover to Two Bits book is, in a word, beautiful. Click the image to read the story behind it.
