So lately I have not had much luck getting open licenses for my articles (though I have for my book, which I will write about later) but SAGE is offering “Free Access” for the month of April. Alex “Rex” Golub and I have a piece, which is fairly jargony (in the academic sense) on three variants of hacking, which you can download here. The forthcoming articles are more accessible and I will drop a note when they are published.

I agree. This is the book that really engages with the craft of writing.

I have a long list (it exists only in my head unfortunately) of various ethnographic projects I would like to conduct. I might start the real list soon but in the meantime, I will just through the half-baked ideas here and perhaps it will inspire others to take it on. I am currently reading a fantastic book, The Case Against Perfection, and am on a section on hyperparenting and well, while I think at a common sense level we know what psychological havoc such controlled parenting can cause, I think an ethnography of some of the practices and institutions of hyperparenting would, nonetheless, make for a fascinating read. If anyone knows of anything that even resembles this, do drop me a line.

Update: Not exactly an ethnography but certainly fun to read.

The title of this book makes me realize how much a good and catchy title matters for a book. This one really caught my attention as I am fond of both irony and technics. Never thought of putting them together but someone surely has and it sounds like he has written a pretty nifty philosophical book on technology.

Geeks are creatures of the screen. Many, I have found, are also great lovers of books. I have peered into the homes and apartment of many and books usually adorn the walls and the tables. The exist in abundance. Though I am more or less paid to read for a living but these days, I don’t seem to the time to do extra reading and I often mourn the fact that I spend so much time getting scraps of stories and information from the net as opposed to delving into a great book, over the course of weeks and weeks (and as opposed to reading, often hurriedly but totally intensely, for class).
I do manage to get in some good articles and last night, I pushed through the heaviness of sleepiness to read a pretty interesting article People of the Screen by Christine Rosen.

Though a bit too alarmist for my taste, I enjoyed reading it, largely because it was written well and also brought some interesting questions and points to the table about the transition from a print culture to a digital one. One point, that I was not surprised to read, is the most avid of screen users (programmers, the digerati), are also avid readers. But among the less (economically) privileged, who have different educational relationships to books and who also may not have the time to read, reading in the traditional sense, is may soon be a more or less historical fact.

What I also enjoyed reading about and contemplating are the different material properties of the screen vs print book and the ways in which these affordances might create a different user/intellectual (almost existential, the author would argue) experience. For example, she argues that the emotional relationship to treeware books are more profound, or that reading a long novel (vs playing a video game) is about submitting your will–at least for a while–to the narrative and the story. I don’t agree with all of her assessments but I certainly agree that there are phenomenological differences between reading words on sheets of paper and the pages of a compact book, and then reading from the blue hue of a screen, often sitting upright, and whose text, at least for me, does not seem quite alive as it is when imprinted on bounded paper.

But I don’t think this necessarily has anything to do with some inherent properties of the screen. For example, writing on the screen does nothing but enliven text for me. When it comes to writing, I cannot imagine doing it any way but via the screen and the keyboard. I can play around with some words and erase with impunity. I can move around a whole paragraph here and there, split it into two or three and as such it feels dynamic and quite alive. I am sure I have lost, or there is something to lose, by not going straight from brain to pen but I never did all that much serious writing without the keyboard and so perhaps there was nothing to lose, no bodily transitional for me to undergo, and thus nothing to really mourn.

So, I suspect many readers of this blog are voracious writers and readers, on screen and off screen. Do you, can you read novels on the screen? If you love the printed book, why? Are you concerned about the loss of this medium? Or is there nothing to really worry about since technologists will eventually create a new digital medium that will surpass, in terms of a good user experience, the printed book?

Culture Machine has just come out with a new issue and it is all on pirates. Looks like a great collection.

So I usually don’t announce my publications on my blog and for various reasons. The main one is that I am more than a little embarrassed that some of them are behind walled gardens (but being I am a junior prof, I am not in a position to negotiate otherwise). Otherwise, some of my pieces are semi-jargony (in the academic sense) and may not be of interest to readers who I think are more geek than academic. Finally, the process of publishing is so slow, so long, and so painful, I try not to think about it, much less write about it, if I can help it. But I decided to announce this
piece , which is on hackers (surprise surprise) as it might be of interest to some readers and because people can download it for free here for the rest of the month (but registration is required )

Co-written with Alex “Rex” Golub, I am pretty happy to see in print although it is far more “academic” in its tone, argument, and language than most of everything else I have written. This is in part because the article is more theoretical than ethnographic (hence the journal, Anthropological Theory) and tackles the question of liberalism alongside hacking. It seeks to demonstrate that these can be talked about 1) together and in cultural terms 2) that we we can identify some cohesive elements to hacking and liberalism, in part by placing them in conversation with each other 3) and yet we can also locate plurality and diversity within liberalism and hacking as well. This is a lot to tackle and cover in one piece under 35 pages and I am sure it could have been pulled off better but I think it is is a decent start to thinking about these questions. If you are interested but are allergic to academicalese, sticking to the Introduction, the Hacker Ethical Practice: Three Examples section, and Conclusion, will give you a taste of the arguments while avoiding most of the jargon.

The irony of this article is that even if it hits at some pretty theoretical issues, it was provoked by a mundane conversation and disagreement I had with one hacker, Karl Fogel, over another hacker, Kevin Mitnick. After returning from the hacker conference, HOPE, I had dinner with Karl and told him about Kevin Mitnick’s keynote speech, which I found particularity enjoyable and entertaining. After calling Mitnick a hacker, Karl responded with the following: Kevin is not hacker. He is a cracker.” Though I think I convinced him that cracker may not be the best word for him (and he convinced me there are differences between hacking, noting perceptively that “his primary motivation seemed to be getting access to something he wasn’t allowed to have access to—that is, it was more about breaking the rules and the thrill of crossing a social line, than about learning a technical system.“), I decided that I wanted to write a piece that squarely addressed tensions and differences among hackers instead of whitewashing them away as most authors, journalist, and even some hackers do.

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Since most readers of this blog are not fans of the DMCA, I thought you all might appreciate this terse and elegant insight about why the DMCA is such a failed law.

“The existence of the DMCA is an open admission that software has failure modes sufficiently severe that regulation by software alone cannot be trusted. The effectiveness of DRM software as a regulator is therefore dependent on the legal effectiveness of the DMCA … The DMCA creates a category of per se illegal software by outlawing programs that do certain things. But in so doing the DMCA aligns itself squarely against software’s plasticity. In making it illegal to create certain kinds of software, it tries to prevent people from taking full advantage of one of software’s greatest virtues: that software can do almost anything one can imagine.” James Grimmelmann in Regulation by Software, p. 1756

I have blogged about it before, but I will blog about it again as it is that cool: SISU. According to its author, Ralph Amissah, “Susu was born of the need to find a way, with minimal effort, and for as wide a range of document types as possible, to produce high quality publishing output in a variety of document formats.” And really what it does it makes reading on the web a whole lot easier. He can only throw up Free Material and so his options are a little limited but he has recently added Christopher Kelty’s Two Bits, making it easier to read than ever. We just finished reading a about 3 chapters of the book for my class (wish I had known about the SISU for my students but oh well, next time) and here is the latest entry from one of my students covering the birth and development of F/OSS and ending with some questions about Free Culture. Good stuff, if I can say so myself.

The students in my Hacker Culture and Politics have now been at the question of politics and ethics in the world of hacking for over a month. I think a pretty solid foundation has been built and now we are getting into much nittier grittier issues, like intellectual property law. The latest entry is on IP and provides an excellent sense of what we talked about and what we covered in class and in the readings.

I am excited to see the class blog develop, if nothing else, because it gives a pretty good sense of the topics we cover and what conversations we have. I used to find it frustrating to have classes literally vanish away after they were done and yet so much labor and time had been put in them! This type of blogging is important as it can provide a tangible and somewhat fixed medium for capturing and preserving what happened (and then free you from having to save boxes of notes that you can collect during college).

I know there were a number of times I really really wanted to recall something from one of my undergraduate classes, but since I had finally thrown away the big old boxes of notes and readings from those days, there was no place to look. It was just not practical to lug my boxes of notes from place to place, move to move especially when I only wanted to take a look every few years for maybe one thing. With this type of blog, there is a record of what happened for everyone to share.

That said, I am faced with a problem when I teach this class again. Since we provide what I think is a pretty decent account of what we are doing, I will most probably have to put down the blog for a period of time when I am teaching it again though of course the syllabus and readings will also change to some degree.