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Chris Kelty’s book Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Duke

University Press, 2008).

See also John Postill’s blog, media/anthropology

Preface

x-xi Free Software (FS) all about practices, not surface ideologies or goals – it’s
public, ‘about making things public’

xi… in a particular way: ‘it is a self-determining, collective, politically independent


mode of creating very complex technical objects that are made publicly and freely
available to everyone – a “commons,” in common parlance”

xi Cultural significance of FS marked by its ‘proselytizing urge’ and the ease with
which its practices diffuse

Introduction

1 FS shock value when it appeared: making privately owned software of high quality
public

2 FS is ‘a set of practices for the distributed collaborative creation of software source


code that is then made openly and freely available through a clever, unconventional
use of copyright law’

2 Book is about ‘the cultural significance of Free Software’. Culture here means ‘an
ongoing experimental system, a space of modification and modulation, of figuring out
and testing; culture is an experiment that is hard to keep an eye on, one that changes
quickly and sometimes starkly’. [How different or similar to Boellstorff's 2008 notion
of culture as applied to a very different internet study: Second Life?, see previous
blog posts].

2 FS not just about software; example of ‘more general reorientation of power and
knowledge’.

3 To explore cultural significance of FS, Kelty introduces notion of ‘recursive public’:

a public that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and
modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own
existence as a public; it is a collective independent of other forms of constituted
power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production
of actually existing alternatives.

3 (Recursive) publics distinct from unions, corporations, interest groups, mosques,


and ‘other forms of organisation’ in their ‘focus on the radical technological
modifiability of their own terms of existence’.

4 Book revisits time and again three entwined phenomena:


i) the Internet, a singular but heterogeneous ‘infrastructure of technologies and uses’

1
ii) FS, a highly specific set of ‘technical, legal and social practices that now require
the Internet’
iii) recursive publics; a notion that will clarify how the other two are related

5 By studying FS and its modulations we can understand better wider processes


related to Wikipedia, stock quotes, pornography, etc. [A Big Claim - will the book
deliver?]

5 Outline of book:
Part I introduces ethnographically the recursive public notion via ‘international
community of geeks’. Part II looks historically at how FS emerged in 1998-99 but
tracing genealogies back to late 1950s. Separate chapters devoted to history of main
practices that make up FS: namely proselytizing & arguing, porting & forking source
code, conceptualising open systems and openness, creating FS copyright, and
coordinating people and software. Part III goes back to ethnography, case studies of
two projects inspired by FS to make something different in broader domains of
knowledge production, incl. academic textbooks.

6 At stake is ‘reorientation of power and knowledge’; 7 a reorientation unlike the


grand claims of Informatin or Knowledge Society/economies.

7 FS is particular kind of public: a recursive public. Trouble is our present popular


and scholarly understanding of a self-governing public is rudimentary. FS far more
than ideological positioning; 8 in fact, it’s really all about practices, that’s what unites
geeks, the practices of ‘creating Free Software and its derivatives’.

8 Advantage of this term – recursive public – is that it draws attention not just to
discourse (as in common uses of public sphere notion) but also to ‘the layers of
technical and legal infrastructure’ without which FS couldn’t exist. [cf. work on
internet and public sphere, e.g. e-Minnesota, which does indeed focus on discourse
and neglect infrastructure].

9 FS geeks crucial in maintaining the Internet unitary against interests of many state
and non-state agents who’d wish to fragment it. Recursive public and FS practices
have checked these centrifugal tendencies. [Another Big Claim - evidence provided in
the book?]

10 Geeks have ‘ethic of justice’ combined with legal and technical acumen

10 C21 public sphere to be found not in pamphlets, cafes or salons but in mailing lists,
copyright licenses and source code: shift from Tischgesellschaften to
Schreibtischgesellschaften.

10 Reorientation of power and knowledge two main components as part of notion of


recursive public:

a) availability: transparency, open access, etc

b) modifiability (or adaptability): 11 ability not only to access but to transform; core
practice of FS ‘is the practice of reuse and modification of software source code’.

2
Motto of Creative Commons is “Culture always builds on the past” … with tacit rider:
‘through legal appropriation and modification’. This raises key issue of finality:

When is something (software, a film, music, culture) finished? How long does it
remain finished? Who decides? Or more generally, what does its temporality look
like, and how does that temporality restructure political relationships?

11 Modification has become far more routine, fast and sophisticated now that we have
distributed software. [Historical change/increase]

12 Modifiability not just a technical solution, creates new possibilities and challenges
for established practices such as publication

13 Started project studying geeks but constant debates about what exactly was FS led
author to turn to key research question of book: ‘what is the cultural significance of
Free Software?’.

13 In late 90s FS becoming more conscious of being a movement, not just an


amalgam of practices, tools, projects, 14 this discussed in chapter 3.

14-15 Five main components of FS:


1) movement (chap 3)
2) sharing source code (chap 4)
3) conceptualising openness (chap 5)
4) applying copyright/copyleft licenses (chap 6)
5) coordinating and collaborating (chap 7) [on this last practice in filmmaking
domain, see Toni Roig 2008, this blog]

15 Components = practices [but you don't define 'practices' here or elsewhere]

16 Modulation = someone trying out a FS practice in another domain

18-23 Three contributions of Two Bits, often mixed up:

1) empirical: geeks caught in the act of ‘figuring out’ things; superalterns can speak
for themselves, no crisis of representation here! ‘geeks are vocal, loud, persistent, and
loquacious’. But although people essential to ethnography, ‘they are not the objects of
its analysis’; 20 the object is in fact FS and the Internet, or more precisely “recursive
publics”.

2) methodological: example of how may study ‘distributed phenomena


ethnographically’ [and historically as well??]. No single geographical location to
study FS or the internet. Went to places like Bangalore, Boston, Berlin, Houston. 21
One interesting oddity is that ‘nearly everything is archived’. ‘What geeks may lack
in social adroitness, they make up for in archival hubris’ [Nice one, Chris; thus
demanding of researcher the ability to discard huge amounts of materials readily
available? how does this relate to focus on actual practices? to what extent can one
reconstruct actual embodied skilled practice from mailing lists and other such digital
archives?]. So for a lot of questions you don’t need ‘being there’ – stratified
ethnographic research [mmm, but can you still call it ethnographic?].

3
3) theoretical: start by working out ‘which information technologies and which
specific practices make a difference’. For concept of recursive public useful readings
include Habermas, Taylor, Warner, Dewey, Arendt esp. idea of ‘modern social
imaginaries’ [see Leong 2008 PhD thesis on internet in Malaysia].

23 Upbeat end to Intro: contra Habermas’ pessimism about bankrupt public sphere in
C20, are we seeing in early C21 emergence of strong recursive publics that give us
hope?

Chapter 1. Geeks and Recursive Publics

27 What binds geeks together is that they are a recursive public [for definition, see
previous blog entry]

28 … via the Internet, this is what’s distinctive about the public formed by geeks.

29 Geeks argue about technology and through technology

30 the mathematical concept of recursion, from OED and James Boyle; not same as
’simple iteration or repetition’ [but see Giddens 1984 on “the essential recursiveness
of social life” - how specific to programming or Free Software is recursivity? Or
better perhaps, what specific forms does social recursivity take within the world of
Free Software?]

31-3 Hanging out with geeks in Boston, May 2003 [uncanny; that's exactly when
I started hanging out with internet activists in Subang Jaya]. 33 Undying faith in new
technologies; Internet ‘part of the solution to the problems that ailed 1990s healthcare
[in the US]‘.

34 Geeks of ethnographic episode, like all geeks, rely for their technopreneurial goals
on regarding the Internet as a flexible ’standardized infrastructure’.

35 ‘Geek’ refers to ‘mode of thinking and working, not an identity’; but no longer can
we speak of early 1990s homogeneous group of geeks, a subcultural elite.

36-38 Hanging out with geeks in Berlin, Nov 1999. ‘I am now a geek’ – can see like
the Boston and Berlin geeks the Internet as infrastructure, although here the stress was
on political activism not business. 38 The Berliner geeks mix up ‘operating systems
and social systems in ways that are more than metaphorical’.

39 Charles Taylor builds on Habermas and Michael Warner to propose ’social


imaginary’ as a public whose ontology fluctuates between concrete (external) and
imagined (internal), e.g. civil society, a self-governing people, the economy.

39 Kelty understands recursive public as a manner of social imaginary so as to avoid


ideas vs. practices dichotomy.

4
Because the creation of software, networks, and legal documents are precisely the
kinds of activities that trouble this distinction— they are at once ideas and things that
have material effects in the world, both expressive and performative—it is extremely
difficult to identify the properly material materiality (source code? computer chips?
semiconductor manufacturing plants?). This is the first of the reasons why a recursive
public is to be distinguished from the classic formulae of the public sphere, that is,
that it requires a kind of imagination that includes the writing and publishing and
speaking and arguing we are familiar with, as well as the making of new kinds of
software infrastructures for the circulation, archiving, movement, and modifiability of
our enunciations. [pp. 39-40]

40 With notion of social imaginary you can also avoid pitfall of ideology vs. material
practice dichotomy. Plus ideology is always a tricky notion to use – it’s always other
people who have it, not the analyst (Geertz).

41 Ricoeur does take ideology closer to social imaginary.

41-2 Back to Charles Taylor and his notion of social imaginary: “the ways in which
people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go
on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the
deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’.

42 Social imaginary not just the norms that guide our actions; it’s also a ‘moral order’
– ‘a sense of what makes norms achievable’ (still Taylor).

43 Do geeks in Berlin or Boston share a social imaginary? What’s distinctive about it?
Well, their ideas of order are both moral and technical, they mix up “operating
systems and social systems”. [Nice and clear point, thanks Chris].

43-46 Kelty with geeks in Bangalore, March 2000. Mostly male and into heavy metal.
All sorts of ethno-religious backgrounds but secularised. Indian geek and key
informant was influenced in 1990s by Rheingold and Barlow, gave him ideas on how
to run an online community.

47 Silk-list (mailing list for Indian geeks) is metatopical space (Taylor) from
geographical viewpoint but topical space from machine’s viewpoint: list of names all
kept together in a database. It is not ‘the’ public as there are countless such lists.

48 A public, e.g. a reading public, must be autotelic if it is to remain outside power of


state or market or any other social totality. Faith in this autotelic dimension is
essential if public is to exist, it allows individuals ‘to make sense of their actions
according to a modern idea of social order’.

49 Is Silk-list a sovereign public?

50 Geeks committed to sustaining idea of recursive social order, a moral and technical
order grounded in the Internet.

5
51 Reiterates idea: there’s only one Internet, and geeks are engaged in a contest to
keep it that way, they share an imaginary that entwines operating systems and social
systems.

52 Napster shutdown in 2000 angered both music fans and geeks, didn’t help music
industry either; many geeks saw Napster as mini-internet.

52 Kelty illustrates geek mailing list discourse via Napster case, post sent to list by
someone previously unknown called Jeff Bone. 54 His message not ‘published’ in
conventional sense, just clicked send. Exemplifies recursivity in two ways: in being
public statement about how internet should remain open, and it instantiates precisely
that openness and the new publicness it fosters.

55 pre-1993 internet (ie pre-Web) full of people like Rheingold, Barlow, Dyson who
adhered to a ‘vibrant libertarian dogma’ that said no territorial sovereign power could
govern the internet. 56 folk net idea that cos no central command, censorship not
possible. But Lessig and others have criticised this view: internet not static, it could
go in different directions with more or less freedom. It’s a perpetual contest over
maintaining ‘the legitimate infrastructure’ that allows geeks to forge bonds.

57- story of how Internet became standardised: Internet Engineering Task Force and
its Request for Comments system. 58 widely shared bit of geek folklore: “We reject
kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code”. …
“everything that isn’t code is just talk” - a problematic idea, says Kelty, as someone
has to write it first.

59 Internet is layered, ‘each enabling the next and each requiring an openness that
both prevents central control and leads to maximum creativity’.

60 You always need an ‘operating-system kernel or a piece of user software’ and a lot
of people who will all use it. Infrastructure and discourse shape one another
recursively: geeks use mailing lists to discuss and transform the very technology that
allows those discussions in the first place. Process is open-ended.

61- Conclusion: Recursive Public

61 Geeks in Bangalore, Berlin and Boston united by a ’shared moral and technical
understanding of order’ – they’re an autonomous public who maintains and
transforms itself. 62 Have the agency to ‘recurse’ via infrastructural layers in an
unending process. This infrastructure is part of the imaginary – apart from being ‘a
pulsating tangle of computers, wires, waves, and electrons’.

62 Their affinity as geeks – i.e. membership in the recursive public – rests on their
adoption of its moral-technical imaginations.

Chapter 2. Protestant Reformers, Polymaths, Transhumanists

6
64 This chapter is about stories geeks tell, 65 about their modern myths or ‘usable
pasts’

65 At present we see reform and conversion going on in relations binding states,


firms, geeks – not ‘revolution or overthrow’

66 Geeks range from polymaths (technology as intervention into a ‘complicated,


historically unique field’) to transhumanists (technology as unstoppable telos). [aha,
the notion of FIELD pops up - but developed any further in this book?]

67 Geeks love allegories of Protestant revolt – allows them to opt for reformation (so
that they can save capitalism from the capitalists) over revolution. Instead of a
struggle between state and church, the struggle here is between the corporation and
the state, and at stake [no pun intended] not church organisation or doctrine but
‘matters of information technology and its organisation as intellectual property and
economic motor’.

68 Lots of holy wars, big and small: Apple vs. Microsoft, EMACS vs. vi; KDE vs.
Gnome, etc.

69 e.g. in a 1998 article Linus compared to Martin Luther: “like Luther, he had a
divine, slightly nutty idea to remove the intervening bureaucracies and put ordinary
folks in a direct relationship to a higher power – in this case, their computers” :-)

70 These stories are appealing partly cos they avoid polarised, bipartisan language of
US politics. 71 and [again] you can save capitalism from the capitalists.

71 [Terrific parallels with Reformation struggles]

72 These usable pasts of Reformation stories ‘make sense of the political economy of
information’ while distinguishing between power and control. Geeks should be the
ones in power, but controlled by states and big corps who want to manipulate people
‘into making technical choices that serve power, rather than rationality, liberty,
elegance, or any other geekly concern’.

72 Term ‘evil’ often used by geeks to talk about design or technical problems [every
world of practice has its own terminology]. 74 can also be applied to entities such as
Microsoft and how it wants to brainwash computer users.

74 Kelty wants to show how these allegories have worked their ways very effectively
into geeks’ minds through own example as a geek in the making: this is ‘participant
allegorization’ [ha ha]. 75 one Reformation struggle was over alphabet (and cross
heading it). Similarly, (c) carries a lot of symbolic power today.

76 With Reformation allegory, geeks can make sense of unequal power relations; it’s
an ‘alternate imagination’ thru which they evaluate and judge actions taken by
different parties [see Dobie 2004 on p2p stakeholders].

77 Geeks proselytise among non-geeks cos they think it is inevitable that software and
networks will come to shape everybody’s lives.

7
Geeks live in specific ways in time and space. They are not just users of technology,
or a “network society,” or a “virtual community,” but embodied and imagining actors
whose affinity for one another is enabled in new ways by the tools and technologies
they have such deep affective connections to. They live in this-network-here, a
historically unique form grounded in particular social, moral, national, and historical
specificities which nonetheless relates to generalities such as progress, technology,
infrastructure, and liberty.

[Like Boellstorff, Kelty eschews popular labels such as 'network society' or 'virtual
community' in order to specify exactly the kind of social universe he is grappling with
- in this case the recursive public of geeks, in Boellstorff a 3D computer world
populated by avatars].

78 Some geeks, not all, ‘heroise’ the present by telling stories about the past and chart
a future for geekdom.

79- Polymaths

they have no choice but to know ‘a very large and wide range of things in order to
intervene in an existing distribution of machine, people, practices, and places’. 80 The
really hard work is design, i.e. ‘the process of inserting usable software into a
completely unfamiliar amalgamation of people, organisations, machines and
practices’ – the technical, specialised, code stuff is by comparison easy.

82 e.g. Adrian tries to translate across fields of business, engineering, medicine [see
Strauss 2007 and Hinkelbein 2008, this blog, on digital divide mediators or 'new
mediators' in the UK and Germany respectively]

82 Not so much about inventing new things as about their insertion in a new milieu,
an intervention that Adrian calls ‘technology’. [The notion of milieu has potential
both here and in Boellstorff's Second Life world?]. 83 He reckons healthcare IT
companies often use ‘technology’ in a narrow sense as a fix to the hard problems of
management, equity, organisation [old magic bullet problem?].

85 Polymaths think like Feyerabend: no single method will make the magic of
technology work, must be aware ‘of standards, of rules, of history, of possibility’.

86- Transhumanists

86 Believers in technically-driven progress, of humans transcending limitations of


bodies through technology. Timeline of technical progress. 87 Huxley’s article
Transhumanism influential.

89 For transhumanists, technology lives in absolute time, divorced from ‘human life
or consciousness’

92 Technical progress is inevitable but can be intervened in by intelligent beings

93 Transhumanist still operating within mundane, localised demands of technological


work

8
93-94 Conclusion

You can’t simply map US bipartisan divide onto geeks, no technoconservatives vs.
technoliberals. ‘Their politics are mixed up and combined with the technical details of
the Internet’. Geeks are interesting cos they create new things that transform our
political categories. But geeks not kind of person – their affinity shapes and is shaped
by the recursive public they are part of, with Free Software as a paradigmatic case.
Studying FS we not only gain an understanding of geeks, but also of a recursive
public that could transform ordinary life for all of us.

[Another Big Claim, let's assess it in subsequent chapters]

PART II FREE SOFTWARE

Chapter 3. The Movement

97 This second part each chapter history of one of 5 practices that make up Free
Software: ‘creating a movement, sharing source code, conceptualizing openness or
open systems, writing copyright (and copyleft) licenses, and coordinating
collaborations’.

98 All five practices part of a ‘collective technical experimental system’ that


crystallised in 1998-9.

98 Movement = when geeks argue and discusss about Free Software. They may
disagree but all recognise that they are ‘doing the same thing’. So ‘the practice of
creating a movement is the practice of talking about the meaning and necessity of the
other four practices’.

[Is the movement a meta-practice? (see Peterson, reading practices, this blog) Is it an
anchoring practice? (see Couldry 2004, Media as practice)].

99- Forking Free Software, 1997-2000

99 FS forked in 1998 when Open Source term emerged – each term led to separate
narrative. Open Source linked to dotcom dreams of disintermediation and cost-
cutting, had profit-making dimension. By contrast, Free Software was about legal
resistance to ‘intellectual-property expansionism’.

101- Netscape decides to release its source code for reasons to do with the five core
practices of FS, as well as galvanising the new FS movement:

1. Sharing source code: although trouble persuading people that this made business
sense

2. Conceptualising open systems

3. Writing licenses: 104 but when wrote own Netscape license this spliced the
recursive public into half

9
4. Coordinating collaborations:

105 much harder than all the ’spurious talk about “self-organizing” systems and
emergent properties of distributed collaboration’. In practice, software engineering is
‘a notoriously hard problem’. 107 But Netscape didn’t succeed – cautionary tale is
that you can’t just expect ‘the magic pixie dust of ‘open source” to do marvels.
‘Software is hard. The issues aren’t that simple’.

5. Fomenting movements:

108 Raymond suggested Open Source at a 1997 summit. 109 Trouble is he stressed
new forms of coordination over new practices of sharing code or writing copyright
licenses. Raymond not into enhanced human liberty but into development model of
innovation in software production. A pragmatist and libertarian who had no time for
what he regarded as the dreamy communitarianism of Stallman and his Free Software
Foundation. Thought Stallman’s dogmatism was preventing business world from
adopting Free Software.

112 Raymond et al won recognition for Free Software and its role in the success of
the Internet, but under ‘true name’ of Open Source. 112 At any rate, in practical
terms, geeks still did things as usual; ‘different narratives for identical practices’.

112- A Movement?

113 FS and Open Source are NOT:

• collectives: no membership
• informal organisation: i.e. not bands of hackers, crackers or thieves
• a crowd: this is temporary, while FS extended in time
• social movement: FS and OS ’share practices first, and ideologies second’

So the movement shares basic agreement over ‘the other four kinds of practices’.

[But is 'movement', I wonder, the best term to describe the meta-practice of talking
about the other four practices?]

[Also, could we regard FS as a recursive field of practice? a field with its own sectors,
fundamental laws, sites, arenas, leading practitioners, apprentices, etc, see Postill this
blog]

[At any rate, I'm reminded here of Boellstorff equally helpful clarification of what
Second Life is NOT; such conceptual ground clearing is fundamental if the argument
is to proceed].

114 ‘figuring out’ via reflection is crucial to FS and its recursivity

114 The movement is a practice of storytelling: ‘affect- and intellect-laden lore that
orients existing participants toward a particular problem, contests other histories,
parries attacks from outside, and draws in new recruits’.

10
114 Researcher must be aware of geeks’ ‘archival hubris’ – virtually all their
discussions are archived

115- Conclusion

Before 1998, no movement existed. But suddenly geeks had to take sides – either Free
Software or Open Source.

[Isn't this a classic Victor Turnerian 'arena' pointing to the potential usefulness of
regarding FS as a political field in the classic Manchester School definition, i.e. a field
in which struggles over public matters are fought out - see this blog and Turner's
Dramas, Fields and Metaphors; see also edited volume Political Anthropology, 1966].

116 OS and FS materially identical, but different ideologies. OS privileges


technopreneuralism, while FS privileges individual creativity and self-fashioning via
software creation [very similar to Linden Lab's rhetoric about Second Life?].

116 This ideological discrepancy but practical sameness means that ‘the real space of
politics and contestation is at the level of these practices and their emergence’. [Erm,
I'm not clear about this, will revisit it later].

Chapter 4. Sharing Source Code

118 There would be no Free Software (FS) w/o shared source code

118 Source code ‘both an expressive medium, like writing or speech, and a tool that
performs concrete actions’

118 Many FS geeks say “information wants to be free”. Kelty begs to differ:
“information makes people want freedom” because sharing gives rise to a specific
moral & technical order

119 Geeks have naturalised sharing norms over last 30 years; this is the story of the
UNIX operating system, ‘a monstrous academic-corporate hybrid, an experiment in
portability and sharing’ well known to geeks but not to rest of the world.

119 Spread via computer sci students around globe; 120 UNIX kinda ‘primal
recursive public’

120 UNIX unified as concept but devilishly entangled with all its ports and forks

120 UNIX came to be paradigm not only of operating systems but of networked
computers in gral; widely seen by geeks as philosophy that can help answer question:
‘how shall we live, among a new world of machines, software, and networks?’

121- Before Source

121 late 1950s, higher-level languages appear: translation higher to lower level
languages. Irony about computers: although it has general programmability, from

11
1950s hardware created was idiosyncratic, you programmed for a specific machine
and had to rewrite for another. [see Georgina Born 1990s work on AI geeks in Paris].

123 This programming Babel led for search for standardized programming languages
in early 60s: Algol, FORTRAN, COBOL, etc. This is problem of portability: how to
move software across machines.

124 In 1968 IBM decided to unbundle software and hardware; until them had always
been sold together. Portable source code became thinkable. But still restricted
portability: not to rivals’ machines.

125 So the success of UNIX all the more astonishing, became the epitome of an
operating system. 126 Unique commercial-academic hybrid 127, allowed it to attain
conceptual integrity beloved by scholars and designers. “It worked”.

128 Distributing UNIX source code became an engrained practice; this encouraged
users ‘to maintain it, extend it, document it’. Ported to huge number of machines
throghout 1970s.

129 UNIX became essential computer-science teaching cos working operating system
that came with source code and simple, could learn in one or two semesters.

129 Unlike now, in 70s still needed material support of magnetic tape to disseminate
software.

130 Bell Labs lawyers struggled with instability of UNIX; technical quality improved
with all the fixes, updates, new tools but muddied the legal status; aim was to give one
license for one piece of software.

131 Not clear whether AT&T owned the fixes

131 Struggle not between evil capitalists and rebels but between two ways of seeking
to stabilise UNIX [see ANT literature on stabilisation; see also Sperber 1996 on
stability and lability of different cultural representations].

131 Lots of modifications but concept of UNIX remained highly stable.

132 More on pedagogical dimension of UNIX: ‘As it was installed and improved, it
was taught and learned’. So it achieved pedagogical stability more than as a legal
entity or corpus of source code. By contrast, Windows much more widespread but ‘its
integrity is predominantly legal, not technical or pedagogical’. Pedagogically,
‘Windows is to fish as UNIX is to fishing lessons’.

133 Lions’ UNIX textbook incredibly important [on software textbooks and the
muddles of software pedagogy, see Born 1997]. UNIX ported not only to machines,
but also ‘to the minds of young researchers and student programmers’.

134 Importantly, students learning UNIX basics from n-th generation photocopy of
Lions’ texbook were learning at same time about AT&T’s efforts to enforce its legal
distribution.

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134 Lions’ Commentary widely read down the generations, rare form of ‘literary
criticism’ still admired by geeks today, contributing to the making of a recursive
public around a body of source code in both implemented and textual (photocopied)
form, 135 a public that saw itself as “breaking the law” [on software and frequent lack
of documentation, see Born 1997].

135 So UNIXphile geeks connected not just technically, but also socially and legally
[and affectively?].

135 To avoid legal issues, the Amsterdam academic and geek Tanenbaum created
Minix, with no AT&T source code in it. As frequently used for teaching in 1980s as
Lions’ source code in 70s. 136 Exemplified UNIX’s conceptual integrity; stood for all
operating systems. Yet copyright controlled by the publishers, Prentice Hall.

136 Young Linus Torvalds forked Minix in 1991-2 to expand it and take advantage of
new hardware being made in 90s. Both in common: commitment to visible source-
code & sharing.

138 BSD forked from UNIX, new functionalities, esp. code permitting computers to
connect to Arpanet via TCP/IP protocols.

140 UNIX can take on many different forms, resulting from conflicting notions of
sharing and divergent technical and moral imaginations.

141 TCP/IP protocols went pandemic: 98% of comp sci depts in USA incorporated
them into their UNIX systems and instantly gained access to Arpanet.

141- Conclusion

UNIX operating system not just technical feat: making of set of norms for sharing
source code in strange ecology: mix of academic and commercial, networked, global.

141 Three ways of sharing UNIX source code: porting, teaching, forking. [sub-
practices?]

142 Thorny issues raised about standardisation, audit and control, legitimacy – still
apply not just to UNIX but to whole Internet and its “open” protocols.

142 The practice of FS code sharing today not because of individual technical or
marketing genius, but because ’sharing produces its own kind of order: operating
systems and social systems’. Geeks like to speak about ”UNIX philosophy” cos
it’s not just an operating system, it entails those complex inter-
field organisational bonds as well.

Chapter 5. Conceiving Open Systems

143 ‘open’ most complicated part of Free Software: opposite not ‘closed’ but
proprietary software.

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143 This chapter: struggle over meaning of ‘open systems’, 1980-1993.

144 Not just technical, also moral components to contest. Moral = ‘imaginations of
the proper order of collective political and commercial action’.

144 Open systems have a blind spot: intellectual property. Irresolvable tension
between manufacturers promising interoperability and secrecy-ridden intellectual
property regime; a tension between ‘incompatible moral-technical orders’.

144 At heart of struggle was standardisation, but never clear how and who would do it

145- Hopelessly Plural

145 Open systems seen as solution to all the legacy of locked-in computer systems.
But dream of The Computer never materalised: we have a world of computers:
‘myriad, incompatible, specific machines’.

147 From 1950s to 80s stable marketing strategy: find customers, sell them whole
package, charge them a lot. But by 80s computers faster and smaller.

147 Open systems emerged in 80s with promise of interoperability, marketing and PR
people spoke of “seamless integration” [this buzzword still around in 2000s, see
Harvey, Green et al's work on ICT projects in Manchester, esp. unattained dream of
interoperable museum databases across EU; see also my own research on local e-
government in Malaysia, forthcoming].

148 But term open systems “hopelessly plural”, 100+ definitions; means or ends?
whose goals? who set them? do state and non-state agents agree on them? [see Roig,
this blog, on 'double openness' in relation to internet filmmaking].

148 At any rate, openness became a ‘cultural imperative’ [cf. Harvey et al's
'imperative to connect', Manchester ICT projects, this blog]

149 At least one thing clear: opposite of open was ‘proprietary’.

150 Everyone thought open a good idea, but no agreement on *which* open systems.

150 But intellectual property idea of moral order in conflict with that of open systems,
yet intellectual property left out of the definitions of open, taken for granted, not
challenged.

152 From intellectual property viewpoint, would be mad for company to release
source code and let other vendors build on it – what could the company sell then?
‘Open systems did not mean anything like free, open-source, or public-domain
computing’.

152 Account of how UNIX entered open systems contest shows tension between open
systems and intellectual property

153- Open Systems One: Operating Systems

14
In 1980 most obvious option for standardised operating system was UNIX, already
running on more than one hardware type

153 UNIX wars of mid-1980s: vendors from both sides ganged up to support rival
standards.

154 Longhairs vs shorthairs

155 When UNIX spread and became more fragmented, efforts to standardise it

155 Figuring Out Goes Haywire

… circa 1986-8: four rival standards for open systems

155 UNIX had spread (porting) but also differentiated (forking) – 156 different
features added to diff ports

156 Step one: creation of standard that specified minimum set of functions at interface
level: ‘interface definition’ – 157 alas two competing definitions emerged

158 ‘Standards’ ended up being products that firms wanted to sell to their industry via
a consortium, e.g. interesting Sun ad from 1987 tapping into angst over open systems.

160 Open Source Foundation with some of biggest players: IBM, Digital Equipment,
HP…

160 Sun branding itself as open-systems idea originator; promised to free companies
from grip of single vendor

162 UNIX wars of late 1980s: all against all, fighting to show customers that they’ve
made right choice not of machine or software but of standard.

164 UNIX wars show blind spot of open systems: intellectual property rules at odds
with specificities of software; assumption that w/o intellectual property innovation
would stop.

164 – Denouement

164-5 Result not a single winner, but ‘reassertion of proprietary computing’.


Microsoft one big winner for same reasons open systems failed: ‘intellectual property
favored a strong corporate monopoly on a single, branded product over a weak array
of “open” and competing components’.

165 Return to IBM-style monopoly but with new monopolist

166 Open Systems Two: Networks

Another crucial part of open-systems story of 80s was efforts to standardise networks,
esp. inter-networking protocols.

15
167 Conflicting social imaginaries of OSI and TCP/IP protocols; across state, uni,
industry borders. By 1993 TCP/IP had overtaken OSI cos of (a) availability, (b)
modifiability, (c) serendipity, incl “killer app” WWW

168 … familiar C20 battle over gov planning and regulation vs. entrepreneurialism

168- Bootstrapping Networks

From 1970s lots of competing closed networks, with IBM one pioneer

169 Late 70s BBSs appear

169 also in 70s telecomms get in on the action, eg Minitel France experiment

169 in common across experiments: networks piggybacking on existing, state-


regulated telecomms; 170 these hampered by antitrust & monopoly laws

170 OSI and TCP/IP epitomised gulf between computing and telecomms worlds;
Arpanet was ad hoc and experimental, very different from ISO

171 all agreed standard network protocols were a must; although derided for being
slow, bureaucratic etc, the ISO and ITU processes had undoubted legitimacy

172 TCP/IP explicit goal: share computer resources, not necessarily linking two indivs
or companies, or to create competitive markets for networks (software)

173 Requests for Comments (RFC) process integral to process of standardising; 174
geeks love its history cos shows clever, ad hoc solutions to coordination problems –
muddling through

174- Success as Failure

1985 OSI was an official standard, but there were few implementations; 175 it was in
face TCP/IP that turned up in actual systems by late 1980s. Why successful? Again
(see above): availability, 176 modifiability, serendipity.

177-8 Conclusion

To understand FS practices must understand open systems & openness; 1980s open
systems struggles prepared stage for FS, ‘leaving in their wake a partially articulated
infrastructure of operating systems, networks, and markets that resulted from figuring
out open systems’.

177 TCP/IP protocols success created single standard and entity, the Internet, with
own built-in goals mirroring FS’s moral-technical order

178 Constraints to collaborating are in flux, resulting from struggles involving giants
like IBM, onetime rookies like Sun, amateurs, academics, geeks, etc.

16
The creation of a UNIX market failed. The creation of a legitimate international
networking standard failed. But they were local failures only. They opened the doors
to new forms of commercial practice (exemplified by Netscape and the dotcom boom)
and new kinds of politicotechnical fractiousness (ICANN, IPv6, and “net neutrality”).
But the blind spot of open systems—intellectual property—at the heart of these
failures also provided the impetus for some geeks, entrepreneurs, and lawyers to start
figuring out the legal and economic aspects of Free Software, and it initiated a vibrant
experimentation with copyright licensing and with forms of innovative coordination
and collaboration built on top of the rapidly spreading protocols of the Internet.

Chapter 6. Writing Copyright Licenses

179 ‘The use of novel, unconventional copyright licenses is, without a doubt, the most
widely recognized and exquisitely refined component of Free Software’, esp. GNU
General Public License (GPL), by Stallman.

180 by early C21 hundreds of FS licenses + huge legal lit

180 Biella Coleman: no hacking apprentice can make it w/o in-depth knowledge of
intellectual property law

180 Before you can defend ideas like common property and sharing, must first
produce them thru concrete practices [constitution of FS practices is what this book is
about, oder?]

180 This chapter: GPL history (1st FS license) – controversy over EMACS (highly
respected software); 181 GPL ‘figured out’ in the process via new medium: Usenet
and Arpanet lists [recursive mediation?]

181 this story not about hacker genius, but about ‘active modulation’ of practices
among human and non-human agents, all part of broader knowledge-power
reorientation [see STS lit]

181 FS philosophy is fact of FS itself, ‘its practices and its things‘

181 – Free Software Licenses [...]

Dewey on Bentham: his liberal reforms were product of experimentation; 182 same
goes for FS and Stallman, ‘hacker hero and founder of the Free Sofware Foundation’;
famous software creator; ‘Bentham-like inventiveness’

182 Hacks = ingenious solutions to technology problems; work-arounds

182 FS owes its existence to US copyright law which it subverted

183 FS licenses known as copyleft; instead of strong rights for indivs, stress on
porting, sharing, forking software

17
183 But note this is description after the fact; initial goal was not to hack copyright
law

183- EMACS

EMACs not just a text editor, a religion, main interface to operating system for many
geeks

184 pre-UNIX very few progs to manipulate text directly on a display

185 powerful set of tools

185 idea of EMACS spreading via different machines and forms

186 Stallman’s EMACS communal sharing; not universally loved

187 for users strong incentive to join commune and extend EMACS, proto-recursive
public even if autocratic; small size of community helped him

187 Stallman well aware of open systems blind spot [see previous chapters]:
conflicting moral-technical orders of intellectual property

188 Controversy of 1983-1985 in context of explosive adoption and modification of


EMACS

188- The Controversy

189 Social drama [not Kelty's term] around GOSMACS. Stallman accused rival
Gosling of “software sabotage” for selling version of EMACS to Unipress. Yet
Stallman in pickle for using small bit of Gosling’s commercial code. This drama
resolved when Stallman created Gosling-free UNIX version – this became standard.
[Could FS history be rewritten/modulated using Turner's political anthropology, i.e.
fields, dramas, arenas...?].

189 three issues pending: (i) software copyrightable?, (ii) what counts as software?,
(iii) meaning of copyright infringement.

190-1 Gosling didn’t mean’public domain’ by ‘free’; thought public domain would
destroy GOSMACS; 192 back then in 1983 still no FS license, ’no articulated
conception of copyleft of Free Software as a legally distinct entity’.

192 In 1983-85 EMACS commune morphed in GPL – Stallman adding copyrights


and messages to software.

193 March 1985: Stallman’s GNU Manifesto, heated discussions, revisited in various
forms ever since [notice the painstaking, precise mailing list archival research
throughout the book, see Postill and Peterson in press, What is the point of media
anthropology?, Social Anthropology journal].

195 Stallman worried people may be put off by legal threats

18
197 Mailing list post by one Labalme shows proto-FS thinking at work. Also insight
into hacker practices: oral, undocumented, messy [Born's 1997 Paris research among
AI geeks supports this].

198 Social drama [not Kelty's usage] continues – Stallman vs. Unipress.

199 – The Context of Copyright

200 most people in controversy took orthodox line that software not patentable

200 copyright law seldom used for software production at the time

201 copyright gradually and unevenly replaced trade secret as main way of protecting
intellectual property; very important 1976 changes to copyright law, Copyright Act
1976

203 … but didn’t define software – this happened via court cases in 1980s; different
cases answered differently whether software was copyrightable

203 hackers in 1980s far less legally sophisticated than today – didn’t understand well
1976 changes, their practices changed slowly

204 Infringement was crucial issue but avoided by rewriting code

205 Legal uncertainties undermined Stallman’s commune: how sustain it if unsure


about whether could legally use sb else’s code?

206 Lots of flame wars given that law in flux, and US soc litigious plus low legal
knowledge, so danger that many would opt for buying software

206 But these discussions have educated FS geeks and today know almost as much
about intellectual property law as about code

206- Conclusion

207 from 1986-1990 FS Foundation famous among geeks, by late 1990s had own
legal staff; story of EMACS shows that GPL more than a hack: a new, legal commune
208 that stressed sovereignty of ’self-fashioning individuals’; not a return to pastoral
idyll of community but creating something new out of ‘dominating structures of
bureacratic modernity’ [central sociological point of this book; see also Boellstorff's
Second Life study and notion of techne, this blog]

209 EMACS dispute set precedent: young geeks today undergo rite of passage of
getting involved in similar debates – ‘the only way in which the technical details and
the legal details’ can be properly explored

Chapter 7. Coordinating Collaborations

210 Last of four practices/components of FS dealt with in this chapter: coordination.


A lot of hope invested in ‘gift economies’, ‘peer production’, etc.

19
210 Will look at coordination in 1990s

211 Unique about this coordination is that no goals – favour adaptability over
planning. This not same as chaos, rather way of reconciling individual hacking
virtuosos and collective coord you need ‘to create and use complex software and
networks’.

212 Recursive public not just about people and discourse but also about giving
‘concrete infrastructural form to the means of expression itself’. Geeks see
programming and hacking as ‘variants of free speech and freedom of assembly’.

212- From UNIX to Minix to Linux

212 Both Linux and Apache = coordination experiments; both supposed to be fun [on
the rewards of practice, see Warde 2005, this blog]; both key to Internet expansion
1990s; 213 represent a global movement of sorts, as branded in 1998-9

213 Linus Torvalds seen as new generation of FS, post Stallman and Raymond. He
stressed fun, meaning adaptability over planning. Right time and place to become an
“accidental revolutionary”. Not much theorising going on, except perhaps around
‘community’ eg Rheingold [ah yes, community again].

214 late 80s-early 90s a lot of experiment with Internet tools, academic-commercial
hybrids epitomised by UNIX

214 never quite clear what meant by coordination, e.g. level of


explicitness/implicitness of licensing issues

215 Linux started as student project in Helsinki, not intended as contribution to FS


Foundation; thrived cos already in place infrastructure/moral-technical geek
order [notice key importance of unsung mailing lists]

216 piggybacked on Minix, itself UNIX based

217 perhaps cos of EMACS past troubles, Torvald didn’t want to reuse any code,
didn’t want restrictions

217 Design and Adaptability

Tanenbaum (Minix) usually strawman role in Linux story; old comp-sci prof against
young Turk of Torvalds

218 Tanenbaum didn’t want thousands of strangers improve on his Minix: to him
useful for teaching

218 In contrast, Torvald no goals. Debate not really showing Tanenbaum’s


conservatism, but contrast tween two ways of coordinating and collaborating

219 it seems that Torvald accepted just about any contribution, didn’t make decisions

20
220 hierarchical system though, but strictly voluntary

220 all that mattered was whether patch (pieces of code) submissions worked or not;
again adaptability over planning; 221 evolutionary metaphors often used to explain
this, no premeditated design

222 Linux = recursive public of entwined operating and social systems

222 whilst adaptability is all about critique, goals and planning are about negotiation
or autocratic decision-making [cf. Manchester School 1966 definition of politics as
struggle over public goals]

222- Patch and Vote

2nd example of coordination: Apache Web server and Apache Group

223 this is story of ‘progressive evolution’ of coordinating ‘people and code, patches
and votes’.

224 Patching a bit like debugging, ‘but more like a form of ex post facto design’
[reverse engineering?].

225 story of discussion about patches over mailing list, voting innovations, 226
tension individual virtuosity vs. group decisions about developing the same software

227 disagreements over forms of collaborating, presumed forks, etc; list poster 1
‘modesty’ in beavering away alone, list poster 2 frustrated with this silence and
sudden revelation

229- Check Out and Commit

229 Source Code Management systems (SCMs): tools for organising code and people.
Shows problem of recursive-depth: FS still free if made with non-free tools?

230 SCMs anyone can check out code, but only some people can ‘commit’ it; 231
used by both Linux and Apache, 232 e.g. Apache voted to elect trusted committers,
those with ineffable “good taste” [same story in every field of practice, e.g. journalist
'nous' in study by Nottingham Trent ethnographer]

232 Sep 98 fight Linux kernel developers: Torvalds not up to speed, posssible forking
of Linux – ‘there is only one Linus’ [egocentric social field; not to be confused with
egocentric network]; Torvalds avoided fork after came back from holiday [mensch,
wish I could get a holiday, this blog is a slave-driver]

233 Stallman’s ideology vs. Torvalds’ fun/pragmatism

234 settled vs unsettled practices: GPL was stable document, whereas SCMs
coordination still in flux

21
235 like EMACS controversy of 1985 [see earlier chapter], 2005 Bitkeeper
controversy Torvalds created own SCM – in common, the issue of how recursively
deep the meaning of free. Experiment failed, but lesson learnt about not to use SCM
to coordinate people and code. Also that adaptability not matter of genius invention
but of ‘critique and response’.

236 both Torvalds and McVoy figuring out limits of FS but differently: bottom-up,
nondesign vs. top-down, planned.

236- Coordination is Design

hype about ’self-organizing systems’ when people don’t know how things work

237 same point about FS coordination reiterated: all about adaptability not planning;
debugging can mean lots of things

238 key problem of coordinating: how do you collect and redistribute changes made
by contributors?

239 FS finds niche tween spaces of design and debugging

239- Conclusion

Both Linux and Apache are social experiments with technologies, legal tools,
governance and coord systems, moral-technical orders

Important cos central to expansion of Internet, which in turn changing how we think
about governance, knowledge and power [big claim about the Net, cf. Boellstorff's
claim about Second Life]

As a recursive public, FS proposes and provides alternatives [I'm not clear now
whether only FS is a recursive public or Linux, Apache etc as well?]

240 all this to be seen in historically specific not universalist terms

Chapter 8. “If We Succeed, We Will Disappear”

243-4 Nice ethnographic entree, 2002. Meeting Baraniuk and Hendriks at Rice to
discuss new idea, to modulate FS into something else: creating textbooks –
Connexions project

244 Question for Kelty: what the same and what new in this project? 245 same thing
as FS?

245- After Free Software

22
modulation = ‘exploring in detail the concrete practices… of Free Software in order to
ask what can be changed, and what cannot, in order to maintain something
(openness?) that no one can quite put his finger on’.

245 so to answer Q “Is Connexions FS?” must look at FS not as ideology but as
socio-technical experiment, look at actual practices. What is FS? What’s the cultural
significance of its practices?

246 Connexions modulates four FS components/practices but not the movement – no


Free Textbook movement yet; came out of FS experience, not pedagogical needs

247 like Creative Commons, heading for a recursive public which textbook and
entertainment industries resist

247- Stories of Connexion

Nice story of dinner speech [and refreshingly unAmerican self-deprecation when


Kelty messes up the story, overcomplicates it but rescued by eloquent Rich Baraniuk]

“I sigh in relief…I can let the superaltern speak for himself” [nice one, Chris]

248 idea of Open Source textbook, a la Linux; 249 FS textbook repository

249 textbook modules closer to model of science than humanities or social science

249 if our brains not linear, why should textbooks be?

250 the more modules, the more connections to be made

250 trouble is Connexions project took off during bubble burst 2000, eg failed
Columbia project, so it’s a hard sell

251 MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) not coming out of Open Source; 252 decided to
give content away but still charge a lot for “MIT experience” on campus, adding value
to it

252 In contrast, Connexions massive experiment coming out of success of Open


Source; Connexions is about “communities” says its champion, 253 whilst OCW just
offloading existing content onto the Web [see Mark Deuze on contrast between
newspapers who offload print content and those who create new Web content]

253 all changes recorded in Connexions; what really excites people is possibility of
creative links across modules, classes

254 – Modulations: From Free Software to Connexions

Connexions surprises people for same reasons as FS, same practices and components
– idea that people will share and modulate textbook contents: port, fork, share them

255 complex economy of contribution and release, plus issue of digital ‘content’

23
256 idea of openness harks back to 80s: crucial to project is info created by people,
unlike locked proprietary systems

256 Connexions promoters not into online textbook publishing fame, but into
becoming ‘a famous publishing infrastructure‘ [a key notion throughout this book];
i.e. they want perpetual openness, *a recursive public*

257 Stallman applies same principles of software to textbooks: to remain useful, must
be kept freely modifiable

258 – Modulations: From Connexions to Creative Commons

Nice James Boyle story when he came to Houston and met Kelty et al to talk Creative
Commons

259 Creative Commons not FS types, mostly lawyers and activists, yet all saw 1998
Open Source emergence into limelight as being very important

260 Creative Commons more than about licenses, about struggle for culture, freedom
to use one’s culture (Lessig); 261 idea that culture ‘besieged by the content
industries’; 262 Disney great cos drew from surrounding culture

260 back-door entrance as couldn’t change laws

262 Creative Commons quickly became movement more than writing licenses
experiment

262 Boyle wanted Connexions to get involved in Creative Commons – our


anthropologist as go-between

263 – Participant Figuring Out

For Kelty, experience with geeks more valuable than anthro or social science
background to his Connexions work; all about ‘an imagination of openness, an
imagination of social order” learned with geeks

264 he wanted to ‘help figure something out’; but some tricky questions about
modulating out of geekdom: meaning of collaboration, reuse, limits and breaches, etc

265 Glenn suggested Some Rights Reserved instea of All in some cases; great ability
to switch from language of law to marketing

266 Workshop, two threads: (1) digital libraries, educational tech, etc, (2) law,
economics. All keen to make a difference not just talk about these things. Boyle in
Dec 2002: “We actually made something; we didn’t just sit around writing articles…”
[oops, that hurt, Boyle]

267 Lessig not focussed on law but on “culture”: understanding and manipulating
customs and norms [see Martin Jordin's lecture notes on this, Sheffield Hallam Uni]

24
267 consensus: public domain like environment for 1960s environmentalists –
commons, public goods, etc. All part of power/knowledge reorientation discussed
throughout book. Institutional economists bewildered by this phenomenon.

268 Connexions cross tween thought experiment and natural experiment: conducted
in the open, unbounded, open-ended…

268 Interplay of Connexions and Creative Commons lesson for Kelty in Anglo-
American common law, as opp. to Napoleonic legal rationalism. ‘It was a practical
experience of what exactly the difference is between legal code and sofware code,
with respect to how those things can be made flexible or responsive’.

Chapter 9. Reuse, Modification, and the Noexistence of Norms

269 What are implications of Connexions for FS practices and their modulation?

270 This chapter: how Connexions and Creative Commons (CC) modulations of FS
relate to ‘the problems of reuse, modification, and the norms of scholarly production’.

270 in ‘figuring out’ what trying to do, both projects hit a surprise: changing meaning
of finality of a creative/scholarly work; how do such works attain identity, stability,
completion? Trouble is how to stabilise content in unstable context

270 project members want to redefine finality in open and public way: modifiability
to be integral to how knowledge stabilised [sounds counterintuitive; do these efforts
make sense?]

270 two tricky issues: reuse and 271 whether norms exist. After all we’ve had “turn to
practices” in anthro and science studies, and this partly away from norms [but practice
theory only mentioned in passing in Two Bits, see Brauechler and Postill, this blog;
what's Kelty's implicit theory of practice?].

271 … yet interestingly geeks are into Mertonian norms of science. But can norms be
created?

271- Whiteboards: What Was Publication?

272 long process of figuring out, of modulating: ‘template-work’; Connexions


looking at scholarly publication thru FS template

273 History of book, Johns more useful than Ong: to create a reading public not easy;
printed texts in C17 seen as unreliable, needed system of evaluation to establish their
legitimacy [this is pure media anthropological history]

274 so instead of Ong’s ‘print logic’ wt Johns we get historical specificities of how
different print cultures developed; not just a matter of standardising books, ‘a
publishing infrastructure’ needed: reputation, social engineering, skills of distinction,
consensus, etc that we know from STS.

25
274 After long struggle, Johns shows C20 idea established of a single print culture
[remind me to get this book]

274 Connexions two challenges: figuring out historical changes, creating/changing


infrastructure to meet demands of authoritative knowledge – 275 from authority of
publishing in Gutenberg Galaxy to that in Turing Universe.

275 – Publication in Connexions

Three phases to create Connexions content:

1) composition, not just writing

2) 276 translation, into marked-up Connexions system (XML); not quite public
document though on Net

3) “publication”, but not finality or fixity as can be altered, same as highly politicised
Wikipedia entries which never stable

277 Not just textbook’s tangibility transform, but very cultural significance of
texbook writing as practice

277 [examples of remediation, not Kelty's term]

278 new copyright questions coming out of Connexions: ‘how much change
constitutes a new work’?

279 many academics uneasy with Connexions, not seeking to replace the book but
whole publishing process; part of broader, old problem: reorientation
power/knowledge; 280 knowledge as living and in flux, not final or static; changes
can be made ‘in real time’

280 no goal to destroy publishing yet shaped by same moral-tech imaginations as FS


and internet

281 keyword is ‘community’ – Connexions tagline: “Sharing Knowledge and


Building Communities” [well I must say you've picked a dubious notion, why not
Publics?]

282- Agency and Structure in Connexions

decoupling author from owner of content; yet avoiding ‘authorless, creditless’


Wikipedia system that most academics abhor

284 so you get via CC more flexibility but also more open than Wikipedia which
rigidly committed to ‘a single definition of authorship and ownership’

285 [tacit communitarianism of Connexions team]

285 – From Law and Technology to Norm

26
reuse is the main Connexions concern and modulation, ie modulating meaning of
source code to extend to textbook writing

286 second concern is scholarly “norms” re: creation, use, reuse, publication and
circulation; whiteboard diagrams [not mailing lists?] used for this

286 geeks naturally reach out to highly codified law, but with academic norms a lot of
it not codified, which makes both geeks and scholars uneasy

287 forking always necessary? why not collaborate?

288 diagram captures how FS components being experimented with; many academics
worried about challenge to system that has worked for centuries

289 free texbooks movement (final modulation) doesnt exist yet

290 whole project boils down to creating recursive public

291 Connexions software ignores disciplinary boundaries

292 reuse problem raises vexed issue of whether norms actually exist – or are we
talking legal and technical practices?; 293 yet if strategy is to work, norms MUST
exist

293 – On the Nonexistence of Norms in the Culture of No Culture

Kelty’s phone conversations with Glenn over Connexions: technical and legal jargon
galore; 294 very fine legal and technical nuances – learned a lot about legal language
in rel to cultural norms

296 ‘punting to culture’ in some cases, 297 i.e. leaning on culture to clear up moral
ambiguities beyond legal pale

298 differences tween culture and law; law can do little about entrenched artistic or
scholarly custom but at least licenses can channel meaning of copyright, reuse, etc

299 Creative Commons are legally binding, though the aim is to change norms, e.g.
promoting citation and attribution, fair use, flexibility, etc.

300- Conclusion

CC and Connexions extend FS practices in novel ways by modulating them [see also
Toni Roig, internet filmmaking 'modulations', this blog];

Commitment to perpetual openness of contents to modification, challenge, reuse, etc.


Reorientation of power/knowledge demands not only legal and technical response,
also public response.

THE END

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