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.
6 responses so far ↓
2-Bits Processor Project: Boot Sequence « ComPromise // 28 June 2008 at 3:46 am
[...] not fooling anybody. Unlike my wonderful housemate Mike, I am not capable of using the phrase “In a Marxian reading of Kelty” and you won’t find much reference to existing social theory basically because I suck at [...]
Chris // 30 June 2008 at 3:57 pm
Speaking of that Marxian reading… we might have to chat about your take on “base” vs. “superstructure”, Mike. ;)
–Your Thesis Supervisor
Tim // 2 July 2008 at 1:45 am
Yeah, after Chris and Christina’s mention in her post, I’m going to have to continue hammering on the Marx (though from a different angle).
It’s interesting that you bring him up. The much-hated Andrew Keen of “Cult of the Amateur Fame” has commented on Web 2.0 and more generally themes of a recursive public:
“[It] worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer. It suggests that everyone — even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us — can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves. Web 2.0 ‘empowers’ our creativity, it ‘democratizes’ media, it ‘levels the playing field’ between experts and amateurs. The enemy of Web 2.0 is ‘elitist’ traditional media.” He describes Free Culture proponent Lawrence Lessig as an “intellectual property communist”,[10] who he “particularly detests”
I disagree with Keen a bunch. But I wonder to the extent that Marxist-like narratives play a role in Free Software. There’s a sense I think in which the “story” that geeks — especially free software geeks — like to tell about themselves is tinged with a sense of class struggle. The little oppressed knowledge workers that are the exploited means of production rising up against the big corporation, or the big government, or anything big you can think of.
I know Christina is going to say it’s a holdover from the formative days when geeks were shunned, but I wonder if there’s more to it. Is there a socioeconomic element to geekdom? Is it mostly a middle to upper middle class preserve? I wonder how that shapes involvement in and the future of a recursive public that has values of encompassing all (Weber anyone?)
maginated // 2 July 2008 at 8:33 am
@ Chris and Tim:
At the very least, I would argue that with the rise of digital, distributed modes of production, geeks and free software hackers are made aware of their relationship to their means of production. For many free software hackers, the Internet is no small part of how the productive process works, and their explicit awareness of this fact would be, in my opinion, part of why they constitute a recursive pubic.
Of course, few people in touch with reality would blanket such publics with the term communist, but that doesn’t mean that Marx is not relevant as an analytic framework.
And I do think that the question about there being a “socioeconomic element to geekdom” is one worth pursuing–though it would certainly be a difficult one to completely flesh out.
Tim // 7 July 2008 at 5:35 pm
I think in some sense the Internet tends to dissolve the usual Marxian concept of the means of production. Unlike a factory or other similar forms of industrial organization, the internet/computers are a means of production that seem less “dehumanizing” than the other technologies Marx talks about. I wonder if this will tend to promote a kind of geek “class consciousness” or tend to inhibit it.
Chris // 8 July 2008 at 4:41 pm
I can think of at least one simple marxist (or marxish) story to tell about Web 2.0, and maybe this is all there is to the higher-flying claims Tim mentions. It is this: under old media, media companies own the means of production (printing presses, fancy recording equipment, etc.); now anyone with a computer, plus maybe some very inexpensive digital equipment, owns the means of production. This simple shift is what is behind (e.g.) the independent media centers, and the fact that I was able to own a very inexpensive minidisc recorder and go to DC in 2000 to cover protests against the World Bank, and upload it immediately at the DC Indymedia’s storefront production site.
BUT–this is just one corner of the world of capitalist (and even media) production, so the higher-flying claims about new media, Web 2.0, etc. would have to be based on other evidence. E.g. I don’t know how to assess the claims about geeks, knowledge workers, etc. As far as I can tell, if there is any leveling going on, it is knowledge workers being pushed down to the level of other workers, not raised up to the level of elites. But that is a function of the rest of the economy, not technology.