So, so, so, I have spent the last few days with my sister and niece romping around SF, mostly walking and protesting and it has been really fun! I have always considered my sister more on the conservative side but after spending some time with her this weekend, I have decided that if she had grown up in the 60s or 70s here in the Bay Area, she would have been one heck of leftie hippie. She was like giving me the scoop on Martin Luther King and the FBI, corporate slime-balling, and other such delicacies. I was surprised given some of the things she had told me in the past, like that eating with chopsticks is uncivilized so of course, I had to eat chopsticks for the week she was visiting my dad and I when I was 15. Anyway, it was great to hang with her before she moves to France.

The protest in SF was pretty large this weekend, with a heavy and colorful representation of signs, even more signage than last time. But the coolest thing about the protest this weekend was really “the protest(s).” There were a ton of them, worldwide with some very large numbers. In Italy there were like two million protesters. Can you imagine, TWO MILLION ITALIANS?!!! The collective passion must have been colorfully oozing through every inch of the city . But some of the smaller protests like the one in
Antartica also spoke a thousand words.

But really, I think that soon we will realize just how significant this world wide, coordinated, pouring of anti-war protesting is. The numbers are not to be taken lightly especially given that the US has not even gone to war yet. I think the world is also taking this opportunity to collectively say to the US, “we are sick of your meddling ways,” and I just hope that this country will start to listen. Also, how about this: we just might turn what is a “preemptive strikes” into a preempt the war through protests….

Check out protests pictures from around the world.

I decided to start reading the Guyana Chronicle again to keep up with a part of the world that is rarely covered in the mainstream or independent media. I did not think that I would read about such a burning free speech/civil rights case going on in Australia in the Guyana Chronicle.

But next door to Australia, in New Zealand, there is a slightly more pressing (but ever more slight) legal situation. They are thinking of passing a DMCA-like law but are first accepting comments, including international ones. Here is what you can do:
————————————————————————————————————–

New Zealand’s incumbent government prides itself on being
highly consultative, so you’ll have the ability to tip the
scales in favour of the consumer and the private citizen.
The more New Zealand can be swayed to a less oppressive
position, the more force there’ll be towards efforts to
repeal/mitigate the DMCA in the USA, because NZ can then be
cited as a positive example.. So it’s actually in *your*
interest, in the USA and other countries, to make a
submission.

Submissions must be received before Friday, February 21,
2003. Please don’t delay unduly – it’s easy to blink twice
and discover that the date has already passed.

Snail Mail is probably best, sent to the following address: Digital Technology and the Copyright Act 1994
Attention: Victoria Pearson
Regulatory and Competition Policy Branch
Ministry of Economic Development
PO Box 1473
WELLINGTON,
NEW ZEALAND

Email submissions are also accepted -
victoria.perason@med.govt.nz

—————————————————————————————–

The Finnish Supreme Court ruled that taxi driver’s have to pay royalties for backseat music. Talk about policing every last iota of social space. The taxi???

This is just plain wrong and, surprising, as I thought it would happen first here in the US and not a place like Finland. I mean, the first thing I thought is: “wow do they even have taxi’s there?”‘

It makes me think of the “Mambo Taxi” guy in one of my all time favorite movies Women on the Verge of A Nervous Breakdown . If this law was applied in Spain, the mambo taxista would no longer be just one kick ass taxi driver and part-time amateur therapist, but a total copyright infringer/pirate (yarrr!) as he plays all this Mambo music and has all this cool Mambo paraphernalia in his taxi. Aldomovar whose specialty is the comic, the absurd, the atrocious, and the unthinkable, should consider doing a work on the “ExtreMe CuLture” of legally policing that seems to be creeping up everywhere.

But hey, maybe the powers that be should try to pass this law in the True and of the Taxi, NYC, because maybe the taxi drivers there would like all revolt and wage war. Now wouldn’t that be ironic if the fight against IP came not from scientists, artists, or hackers but taxi drivers? Taxi Drivers of the World, UNITE!

Just got word from Seth who is out in Washington D.C. that the Eldred case is going to be heard today. I have been waiting for this one for a long time. The depths of my cynism will emerge if the court rules in favor of (c) extension….

I think a lot about freedom these days. The whole reason I am here living here in San Francisco is to study the freedom-loving-hackers who are bringing civlization to its knees [hehe]. So, I talk about it with people, think about it, and occasionally feel it.

Lately, this feeling of freedom has come from my escapades biking whether I go on ride with friends or as I struggle to get to all the places I need to go to. I got rid of my car, luna, a 1978 yellow Toyota Celica when I moved to the Mission and have relied on my bike and/or public transportation to get around. So, in the last two days, I have been able to make it “on time” to my various meetings thanks largely the two B’s: bart and my bike.

On Tuesday I used my bike and bart to get to the east bay where I met with
Nicolas from Berkeley who is working on some really cool software to help map out the relationship between code and people and people and people on free software projects, software that was inspired by the book
Science in Action written by the wacky and loveable sociologist of science, Bruno Latour. I then rushed back to SF to work at the EFF spending my usual Tuesday nights with a group of EFF and OPG volunteers.

On Wed, I went back to Berkeley on Bart to meet an Apache and Debian developer,
David W who is an avid cyclist, lucky enough to have lived in Italy for many years to pedal around the beautiful hills of the Italian countryside. I then had to get back to SF to meet with my Chi Gong teacher to practice, talk technique, and of course Gong that Chi. I honestly did not think that I would make it in time as I got distracted on irc (surprise surprise) but I was able to pull myself just in time to pedal swiftly and make it, albeit sweaty, to his house.

Biking feels free and is a form of freedom. You freely race down the hills as fast as you can go, you can bust past cars stuck in traffic (and smile righteously), you can pick new routes. You are free to move how you would like to. To bike frees you from the headaches of tickets, gasoline, parking, insurance bills that come along with owning a car. And there is nothing like biking for days and days knowing that you got from one city to another with just your legs, some passion, and a nice piece of technology. Biking adds some freedom to the world in general, lessining the envrionmental impact on our earth and our entrenched dependance on oil which has caused one heck of a lot of violence and turmoil in our world. This sticker that I found on
laughingmeme captures the darker underbelly of our oil consumption.

Biking to commute is thus as much of a political act as voting. But unfortunately as individuals residing with a larger society, we are not entirely free to make the choice of totally relying on bikes and public transportation for our mobility. There are some serious structural constraints to “choosing” to communte soley by PT and bikes, mostly due to the spatial organization of our society that is clogged with suburbs many of which don’t have any lifelines to public transportation or only have very slow moving ones making it nearly impossible to rely on public transporation. So, if one can use a bike or public transportation, wonderful… I hope that more and more people will individually do their part and get their booty on the bike or on the train if it is so possible. Otherwise more collective, organized action is needed to make sure that structurally, people can individually have the freedom to choose to commute in a more envrionmentally sound way…..

This gives new meaning to Pedal Revolution : )

Pedal Power: Look Ma No Wires:

An innovative, pedal powered, wireless network provides Internet access to off-grid villages in Laos.

Jhai PC is a project of non-government organisation (NGO), Jhai Foundation.

“The equipment will be powered by electricity stored in a car battery charged by ‘foot cranks’,” Lee Thorn, Jhai Foundation chair, explains. These “are essentially bicycle wheels and pedals hooked to a small generator. The generator is connected to a car battery and the car battery is connected to the computer.”

“Connection with each computer to the others will be by radio local area network (LAN),” he says. “Each village will connect to one repeater station powered by a solar means on the ridge near the river valley. That station will then send the radio signal to the microwave tower nearby and eventually to a server in Vientiane that will connect the villages to the Internet.

I am once again listening to”Lift your skinny fist like antennas to heaven” by Godspeed you Black Emperor. It goes without saying that I like it and am currently too lazy to change the cd from my player. But I think the real reason that I have such an affinity with this album is that for some weird reason the tone, the melody and the unfolding of the two songs seem to match the quality of my life as I travel through the world of software conferences and cons. In the last 5 weeks I have attended 5 hacker con or trade shows. This has punctuated my life with a series of intense intense days of incredible sensory overload and socializing with short lulls of stillness back in SF when I catch up with laundry. The lull is interrupted with the frenetic pace of errand squashing and next thing you know I am gone out the door. If you listen to “Lift your skinny fist like antennas to heaven” there are these very intense periods punctuated by slower noises and melodies that build up and crescendo. It resonates with the pace and flavor of my life.

Tonight, I just got back from a FSF fundraising event where Lawerence Lessig spoke to a room full of geeks about the need to, Goddammit get political. Though his talk was not as impassioned as the one that gave at OSCON, he was quite adamant about the need for technologists to get more traditionally political and not just through technology as Declan suggested yesterday in his, I hate to put it this way, asinine article, but through good old fashioned politics. I liked it when Lessig said:

“I am here to plead with you to resist the Declanization of the movement.”

I have seen Lessig speak over 6 times in all sorts of different contexts, from talking to khaki-wearing uptight, intellectual-property-loving law students at the University of Chicago (who thought that his perspective in Code and other Laws of Cyberspace was a sick, sick, blasphemy) to computer scientists at Stanford, to events like the one tonight. He spends nearly half the year talking to all sorts of audiences and he has had a strong impact on shifting political orientations, at least in the hacker and free software community. It is quite often that I hear either in informal conversation or during one of my formal interviews, that Lessig has shaped the way that x person thought about politics, a shift which has yielded a more explicit political consciousness. One though that is still in its infancy, which is why Lessig is reacting so strongly to Declan’s piece which is trying to shift the orientation back to 1′s and 0′s. He does not want to see his hard work thrown to pieces.

You see, among other things, what is bothersome about Declan’s piece is that he presents a vision of community politics in which hackers can only specialize in one area, which in this case is politics though technology as with Phil Zimmerman and PGP. What he fails to acknowledge (and I don’t know how such a smart guy could have so ignored these facts), is that some of the most hard core technologists, like Richard Stallman and John Gilmore have hacked up some of the most clever and non-technological institutions of political action: the the copyleft and the EFF (it is ironic and almost embarrassing the Declan cites the cypherpunks as an example for why geeks should just chose a technological path for political action given that John Gilmore was one of the original members). As much as PGP is one of the most valuable political tools, the cultural, ethical, and practical world of hacking would be a much much more barren and bleak place if it were not for the the legal craftiness of the copyleft and the institutional force of the EFF.

And speaking of barrenness, that is what Declan’s vision of politics is (at least in this piece). You see, I have really been quite excited about the more outwardly political wanderings of technologists not because it might replace the technological imperatives that have a strong political impact and import but it could add to and enrich an already existing form of cultural politics (I mean cultural politics in this case to be politics achieved through technology driven by an ethic of information sharing and privacy). Strength of political action not only emerges through numbers, vision, message, etc. but by the embodiment of distinct political tools at hand to fight. So, first it is much harder to undermine a political field of action if the field is composed of distinct domains and practices. One might have a lull or setback but then there are others to keep in going. Second, the diversity political tools also might translate into an expansion of who will be attracted into that space. Finally, there is a form of cross-pollination that can occur between different types of political action if there are placed together within close proximity. I think we see that well with the copyleft which is a legal tool that used the principles of hacking (cleverness and refashioning) to hack the legal system for a new ends. Brining together traditional activism within the domain of technological activism might indeed not compromise the supposed “purity” of one or the other but cause a flourishing of novel forms of political action.

So, going back to the start of my rant, with Godspeed You Black Emperor, it is a good idea to get pissed, get political and “Lift your skinny fist like antennas to heaven.” Though skinny from all that typing, raising them might yield some interesting results.

Last night I went to see Dogtown and the Z Boys at the Red Vic Movie House. This is the second time I have seen this documentary about the birth of the sport and culture of skating, a birth that was a messy intersection of local politics, sport predecessors, the modern artifact of plastic, aggressive and flashy personalities, environmental factors, corporate support, and a good deal of love and passion for spending endless hours on your skateboard, always in style.

This morning I decided to read some reviews of Dogtown, which were critical of Peralta for overdramatizing the “fall’ of one of the most gifted and spirited Zboys, Jay Adams. As well as for not being skeptical and objective enough about the birth of skateboarding and the corporate presence that bolstered the growth and proliferation of the sport in the 80s and through the 90s.

Despite the sentimentalism , which I guess I am a sucker for, I think the reviewer, Mark Holcomb entirely misses the boat as to what makes the movie a far more powerful rendition than his weenie journalistic perspective will allow. Even though the movie focuses a lot on the crew of young boys and teenagers from the economically disadvantaged and rough neighborhood of Venice Beach, Dogtown, the film artfully integrated the many other factors and conditions that paved the way for the new drama of skating. Dog town was an area of LA that was rough, dirty, its streets infected with socio-cultural attitude that spread to the local surf spots and eventually to the paved hills and valleys where the local kids first met to skate. Initially imitating the flow and style of surfing and even a particular surfer, Larry Bertelman skating eventually grew into its own as an identity and sport. It is as if Dogtown received a “blow” to its environment and in the process of its ruptured bleeding, skating was born. What I mean by that is that the substance and form of the Zephyr skating team was etched out of the local environment born simultaneously from two polar opposite substances, the water and concrete, fused in the middle by the community of kids that transformed the urban environment into their very own. Born and raised surfing, the Zephyr kids adopted the aesthetics of surfing placing them in skating by crouching low to the ground, cutting, and drawing lines all with deep style. The polyurethane wheel and the drought were the technological and environmental factors that ensured that skating would not be just surfing side kick but grow as its own entity that was eventually fueled by a good dose of corporate sponsorship. The pool, a very potent symbol and material artifact of upper middle class America was hijacked by the skaters as their heavenly play ground. It was the site where skaters first entered the realm of the vertical and really took “unauthorized access” to its logical conclusion.

Along with the fact that skating is just plain and simple: rad, what I find so appealing about it is is that it reclaims public (the streets) and private (pools, backyards) spaces and makes use of them in ways that were never intended. As you all know, I am pretty interested personally and academically in the question of the
commons and what can emerge if you let people create through collective stuff whether it is knoweldge, resources, or material artificats. Skating is one of those activities, like hacking, in which young males males make use of a commons through creative passionate and performative play. Of course there are serious differences between hacking and street skating but there are some ethical, political, and aesthetic parallels that are fun to think about. So, two of my favorite political slogans are basically the same except for the first word: Skating is not a crime and Coding is not a crime . Both activities albeit in distinct ways have been criminalized, in part because of that very fuzzy and hazy concept of “unauthorized access” that both worlds engage in. Skaters gain access to unauthorized “hard” spaces like concrete curbs, parks, and streets, while hackers gain access to the ephemeral space of code and the network. The law has been used to curb both activities. To stop access in the world of computers we now have the overly draconian law like the DMCA and in the world of skating, it is often illegal to skateboard in public places. There are also physical means to stop the two. With technology we have Digital Rights Management while skaters have to face the retarded skate stoppers. Hackers and skaters keep the question of legitimate access in play not through a engagement with politics but engaging in their craft.

The cultural image of the hacker and that of the skater, simultaneously inspire a good deal of loathing among conservative societal elements while the have also grown to hold a revered status as “underground” iconoclastic figures who are led by ideals of passion and freedom to pursue those things that they love. Many emerge out of a similar soci-economic milieu, that of the sterile American suburb and both choose to engage in activities that go against the grain of the isolation and boredom that can tend to characterize the ‘burbs.

Anyway, there is more to be said, but the blog is not meant to be a medium for a leangthy essay so I will leave it at that and check out the movie if you have a chance.

So, remember the story about the HIV + muppet that is going to appear on South Africa’s Seasame Street show and the controversy it caused in the Republican neck of the woods? Well Miss Piggy is pissed.

So, lately, I have been pretty obsessed about the ideas of a commons partially because that is how I like to think of the free software movement as it has significantly contributed to the creation of a technological commons or public repository of knowledge and I think has also revived the idea of a commons for society at large. Here is a seemingly good article, Reclaiming the Comons, on the importance of having a vibrant commons.

But back to free software… What
I find unique about the free software and open source commons that is that it has not been created or guaranteed by governmental, corporate, or academic institutions but has emerged out of the technical and ethical imperatives of a technological professional group. Free software can be seen as a relatively independent cultural space where professional activities and ethics can be freely exercised in such a way that has benefits for others than the professional group. It is possible to add professional groups to the repertoire of philanthropic institutions and activities. Clearly objections can be made about the supposed independence of the domain of open source; academic institutions such as Berkeley and MIT have historically played crucial roles in the development of key free software applications, the Internet where most development occurs would not be possible without government funding and private R& D, many free software developers have high paying jobs that give them the financial luxury to volunteer time, and corporations like I.B.M and Hewlett Packard have contributed significant funds to projects. Despite these and many others connections (which I don’t want to mystify as non significant), it is arguable that free software projects and goods do have a degree of independence from the institutions and social structures that give it different forms of underlying support. If HP files for chapter 11, Debian will still likely exist as a project. It is largely hackers as a collective group who mandate the technical and legal unfolding of software and its distribution. What if other professional groups had an independent domain by which to exercise their professional and ethical work as an ideal for philanthropy??

Though the open source movement is certainly not the first to cultivate and spread the idea of free or cheap computing for social empowerment, it is perhaps the first computer socio-technical movement that has reached a large enough critical mass that its software is in fact being deployed as a commons all around the world by governmental, non-profit, academic, and corporate bodies. Schools around the nation and the world have either adopted Linux as an alternative platform or are seriously considering its use to replace proprietary software.

In some instances, such as in the Portland School district, the local Linux User Group (LUG), PLUG, has played a pivotal role in organizing and facilitating the move from proprietary to open source software in schools. Thus, though open source development and to some degree activism largely occurs online, there is a very important grassroots, local level that is employing open source as a commons. Along with schools, governments in Latin America, Asia, and Europe have either to some degree adopted the use of open source software for government agencies or are seriously considering its adoption. Governmental use of open source software is an interesting inversion of traditional societal roles in which the government is the consumer of public goods as opposed to the producer of them.

Is a commons a form of philanthropy? It is certainly the case that the type of giving that results from a commons has substantial differences from more traditional forms of philanthropic giving. A commons is for anyone to take and use, often in ways that are unknown to the creators of a commons. Use does not require grant applications, goal specifications, or monetary awards. Much in the same way that hackers often hail freedom
One of the most consequential effects of the free software movement is that it has reawakened the idea of and the importance of a commons for our society. What free software has provided is a real live working model based out of a social movement of another distinct legal means by which to induce creativity, reward it, and protect knowledge within our society. One of the hallmarks of anthropology is to make visible the diversity of human socio-cultural interaction, organization, and expression which are too easily are erased by universalistic explanations for human behavior. An anthropological outlook can be used to make us more sensitive and aware of alternatives as well as open up our own cultural categories for scrutiny. Free software development and legal codes has thus among many other things acted as a form of anthropological critique by providing another viable means to knowledge production. The effects I would argue have been profound and are evident in the technical and non-technical projects (an nonprofits) that have burgeoned as a result of direct inspiration by the world of free software. There are a ton of projects out there, like Creative Commons that explicitly takes inspiration from the FSF and the copyleft. Time will tell whether projects like these will take a life of their own but it is good to see their birth…