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diff --git a/data/samples/current/en/two_bits.christopher_kelty.sst b/data/samples/current/en/two_bits.christopher_kelty.sst index 57c6249..07234bf 100644 --- a/data/samples/current/en/two_bits.christopher_kelty.sst +++ b/data/samples/current/en/two_bits.christopher_kelty.sst @@ -26,6 +26,7 @@ { Christopher M. Kelty }http://kelty.org/ { Two Bits @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Two-Bits-Cultural-Significance-Software/dp/0822342642 { Two Bits @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Two-Bits/Christopher-M-Kelty/e/9780822342649 + { Discussion @ Lambda the Ultimate }http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3696 @make: :breaks: new=:C; break=1 @@ -894,7 +895,7 @@ The attitudes that geeks take in responding to these questions fall along a spec 2~ Protestant Reformation -Geeks love allegories about the Protestant Reformation; they relish stories of Luther and Calvin, of popery and iconoclasm, of reformation ,{[pg 67]}, over revolution. Allegories of Protestant revolt allow geeks to make sense of the relationship between the state (the monarchy), large corporations (the Catholic Church), the small start-ups, individual programmers, and adepts among whom they spend most of their time (Protestant reformers), and the laity (known as "lusers" and "sheeple"). It gives them a way to assert that they prefer reformation (to save capitalism from the capitalists) over revolution. Obviously, not all geeks tell stories of "religious wars" and the Protestant Reformation, but these images reappear often enough in conversations that most geeks will more or less instantly recognize them as a way of making sense of modern corporate, state, and political power in the arena of information technology: the figures of Pope, the Catholic Church, the Vatican, the monarchs of various nations, the laity, the rebel adepts like Luther and Calvin, as well as models of sectarianism, iconoclasm ("In the beginning was the Command Line"), politicoreligious power, and arcane theological argumentation.~{ Stephenson, In the Beginning Was the Command Line. }~ The allegories that unfold provide geeks a way to make sense of a similarly complex modern situation in which it is not the Church and the State that struggle, but the Corporation and the State; and what geeks struggle over are not matters of church doctrine and organization, but matters of information technology and its organization as intellectual property and economic motor. I stress here that this is not an analogy that I myself am making (though I happily make use of it), but is one that is in wide circulation among the geeks I study. To the historian or religious critic, it may seem incomplete, or absurd, or bizarre, but it still serves a specific function, and this is why I highlight it as one component of the practical and technical ideas of order that geeks share. +Geeks love allegories about the Protestant Reformation; they relish stories of Luther and Calvin, of property and iconoclasm, of reformation ,{[pg 67]}, over revolution. Allegories of Protestant revolt allow geeks to make sense of the relationship between the state (the monarchy), large corporations (the Catholic Church), the small start-ups, individual programmers, and adepts among whom they spend most of their time (Protestant reformers), and the laity (known as "lusers" and "sheeple"). It gives them a way to assert that they prefer reformation (to save capitalism from the capitalists) over revolution. Obviously, not all geeks tell stories of "religious wars" and the Protestant Reformation, but these images reappear often enough in conversations that most geeks will more or less instantly recognize them as a way of making sense of modern corporate, state, and political power in the arena of information technology: the figures of Pope, the Catholic Church, the Vatican, the monarchs of various nations, the laity, the rebel adepts like Luther and Calvin, as well as models of sectarianism, iconoclasm ("In the beginning was the Command Line"), politicoreligious power, and arcane theological argumentation.~{ Stephenson, In the Beginning Was the Command Line. }~ The allegories that unfold provide geeks a way to make sense of a similarly complex modern situation in which it is not the Church and the State that struggle, but the Corporation and the State; and what geeks struggle over are not matters of church doctrine and organization, but matters of information technology and its organization as intellectual property and economic motor. I stress here that this is not an analogy that I myself am making (though I happily make use of it), but is one that is in wide circulation among the geeks I study. To the historian or religious critic, it may seem incomplete, or absurd, or bizarre, but it still serves a specific function, and this is why I highlight it as one component of the practical and technical ideas of order that geeks share. ={ Intellectual property ; Luther, Martin +15 ; reformation vs. revolution ; @@ -1564,7 +1565,8 @@ The movement, as a practice of discussion and argument, is made up of stories. I Stories of the movement are also stories of a recursive public. The fact that movement isn’t quite the right word is evidence of a kind of grasping, a figuring out of why these practices make sense to all these geeks, in this place and time; it is a practice that is not so different from my own ethnographic engagement with it. Note that both Free Software and Open Source tell stories of movement(s): they are not divided by a commercial-noncommercial line, even if they are divided by ill-defined and hazy notions of their ultimate goals. The problem of a recursive public (or, in an alternate language, a recursive market) as a social imaginary of moral and technical order is common to both of them as part of their practices. Thus, stories about "the movement" are detailed stories about the technical and moral order that geeks inhabit, and they are bound up with the functions and fates of the Internet. Often these stories are themselves practices of inclusion and exclusion (e.g., "this license is not a Free Software license" or "that software is not an open system"); sometimes the stories are normative definitions about how Free Software should look. But they are, always, stories that reveal the shared moral and technical imaginations that make up Free Software as a recursive public. ={ moral and technical order ; recursive public ; - social imaginary } + social imaginary +} 2~ Conclusion @@ -1938,7 +1940,7 @@ Openness is an unruly concept. While free tends toward ambiguity (free as in spe In this chapter I tell the story of the contest over the meaning of "open systems" from 1980 to 1993, a contest to create a simultaneously moral and technical infrastructure within the computer ,{[pg 144]}, industry.~{ Moral in this usage signals the "moral and social order" I explored through the concept of social imaginaries in chapter 1. Or, in the Scottish Enlightenment sense of Adam Smith, it points to the right organization and relations of exchange among humans. }~ The infrastructure in question includes technical components—the UNIX operating system and the TCP/IP protocols of the Internet as open systems—but it also includes "moral" components, including the demand for structures of fair and open competition, antimonopoly and open markets, and open-standards processes for high-tech networked computers and software in the 1980s.~{ There is, of course, a relatively robust discourse of open systems in biology, sociology, systems theory, and cybernetics; however, that meaning of open systems is more or less completely distinct from what openness and open systems came to mean in the computer industry in the period book-ended by the arrivals of the personal computer and the explosion of the Internet (ca. 1980-93). One relevant overlap between these two meanings can be found in the work of Carl Hewitt at the MIT Media Lab and in the interest in "agorics" taken by K. Eric Drexler, Bernardo Huberman, and Mark S. Miller. See Huberman, The Ecology of Computation. }~ By moral, I mean imaginations of the proper order of collective political and commercial action; referring to much more than simply how individuals should act, moral signifies a vision of how economy and society should be ordered collectively. ={ infrastructure ; moral and technical order +3 ; - monopoly +1 ; + monopoly +1 } The open-systems story is also a story of the blind spot of open systems—in that blind spot is intellectual property. The story reveals a tension between incompatible moral-technical orders: on the one hand, the promise of multiple manufacturers and corporations creating interoperable components and selling them in an open, heterogeneous market; on the other, an intellectual-property system that encouraged jealous guarding and secrecy, and granted monopoly status to source code, designs, and ideas in order to differentiate products and promote competition. The tension proved irresolvable: without shared source code, for instance, interoperable operating systems are impossible. Without interoperable operating systems, internetworking and portable applications are impossible. Without portable applications that can run on any system, open markets are impossible. Without open markets, monopoly power reigns. @@ -4440,8 +4442,6 @@ The open-access movement, and examples like Connexions, are attempts at maintain Understanding how Free Software works and how it has developed along with the Internet and certain practices of legal and cultural critique may be essential to understanding the reliable foundation of knowledge production and circulation on which we still seek to ground legitimate forms of governance. Without Free Software, the only response to the continuing forms of excess we associate with illegitimate, unaccountable, unjust forms of governance might just be mute cynicism. With it, we are in possession of a range of practical tools, structured responses and clever ways of working through our complexity toward the promises of a shared imagination of legitimate and just governance. There is no doubt room for critique—and many scholars will demand it—but scholarly critique will have to learn how to sit, easily or uneasily, with Free Software as critique. Free Software can also exclude, just as any public or public sphere can, but this is not, I think, cause for resistance, but cause for joining. The alternative would be to create no new rules, no new practices, no new procedures—that is, to have what we already have. Free Software does not belong to geeks, and it is not the only form of becoming public, but it is one that will have a profound structuring effect on any forms that follow. -:B~ Bibliography - 1~!bibliography Bibliography % ,{[pg 349]}, |