One of my favorite things to watch are the “making of [movie, documentary etc] segments that are now routinely included in any DVD. It is nice to look behind the curtain and see exactly what choices are made, what is excluded, and why they are made.

I wish that more books, especially academic ones, had a “making of” section, giving a window into these choices. We are not exactly encouraged to include this commentary in the book itself but one can find this type of insight in author interview. I recently read one such interview with the author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. The interview is on his site and the original is here.

There are a couple of things that I found particularly interesting, such as how to treat iconic figures such as RMS and ESR [not as researchers, for example ] and the importance of letting your research and thinking brew over a fairly long period of time, despite the pressure of publishing fast, quick and dirty, which is especially strong with anything “digital.”

The book is hefty and long, but as is emphasized in the interview, it is also pragmatic and readable. If folks on Planet have not yet checked it out and are not ready to commit to a long book, I would checkout Chapter 6 on the creation of the copyleft. It is sure to please academics and geeks alike.

Over the years there have been a pretty steady number of foundations that represent the world of Free Software and Open Source. Now there are new foundations that are distinct and with different goals but related such as autonomo.us and now Open Web Foundation. John Eckman has penned some first thoughts on the pros and cons of the OWF in specific, which are worth thinking about.

So I am giving a talk this Friday at the University and here is the English introduction to my talk/paper and below is the Portuguese one. It starts at 9 am in Porto Alegre, Brazil and is being streamed.

*O Departamento de Pós-Graduação da Antropologia e a Associação Software
Livre.org convidam:
*_*
Palestra com a antropóloga Gabriella Coleman*_
professora da New York University (NYU)

*Quando:* Sexta-feira, dia 13 de junho, às 9h
*Onde:* Auditório do ILEA, Campus do Vale – UFRGS
*Entrada:* Gratuita
*Transmissão web: *tv.softwarelivre.org

*
_Revoluções Silenciosas:_*
*O Irônico Surgimento do Software Livre e de Código Aberto
**e a Construção de uma Consciência Legal Hacker*

A palestra oferece uma análise antropológica e histórica do
surgimento da comunidade de software livre e de código aberto,
procurando mostrar como, ao longo de duas décadas, hackers e
entusiastas do software livre garantiram para si um domínio de
autonomia legal para a produção de software. Em uma época
marcada por profundas transformações no regime de Propriedade
Intelectual, a comunidade de software e de código aberto se
organiza cultivando uma acentuada consciência das transformações
no âmbito legal. O objetivo da palestra é o de demonstrar como e
quando se cruzaram as trajetórias parcialmente independentes das
transformações nas leis de propriedade intelectual com a
consolidação do “movimento” de software livre, para se tornarem
histórias inseparáveis voltadas à disputa pelo futuro das
tecnologias – especialmente o computador pessoal e a Internet.
Com este foco, será discutida uma nova prática social de
produção de tecnologia que fornece uma nova visão de mundo
insurgente e que desafia as justificativas neoliberais que
animam a expansão das leis de propriedade intelectual. Nesta
discussão, ao invés de oferecer histórico abrangente, serão
apresentados exemplos selecionados da história do movimento de
software livre e da globalização das leis de propriedade
intelectual, com vistas à caracterização da prática de produção,
distribuição e utilização de Software Livre e de Código aberto
nos Estados Unidos.

Four years ago, the last time I was in Brazil, I came as an anthropologist-in-training to attend and give a talk at Debconf4 held in Porto Alegre. I have returned to this city in the south, again in the winter, but this time I have come back as an anthropologist who is giving a talk at the department of anthropology at the UFRGS, based on my research conducted many years ago. This time, thanks to my (really friendly and energetic) hosts, I am seeing far more of the actual city, its beautiful and aaaamaazing sunsets, its outlying neighborhoods, and even its subcultures.

This has been my first foreign trip where I am interacting primarily with anthropologists and this has been really interesting for me. On the one hand, because of the language difference, there is a lot that is strange and hard for me to follow and I am acutely aware of the general and particular economic gulf between north and south and its impact on students (books are expensive, traveling for conferences is very difficult, and even applying to graduate schools in the north can be impossible because it costs so much to apply to each school!) On the other hand, the methods and subjects of study, the style of analysis, and the teaching are all very familiar, making me feel like I am part of a discipline that (thankfully) transcends national borders. Many of the projects I learned about–the tensions between free software advocacy and development, the role of memory among fan’s of a “corny” country/Gaucho singer from this area and the “surgical management” of intersex (hermaphrodite) newborns were some of the most interesting projects I have come across and gobbled as much information about them as I could.

I was also struck, yet again, by the deep myopias of anthropology, north and south. My own project, which focuses mostly on white, American and European hackers, often does not strike as culturally authentic enough because, well, the people I study are white, American and European (and I am slowly coming to see that if you study the so-called white and male or the North American/European elements of technology and the Internet and the law, you are probably white and male yourself and anything having to do with ethnicity/gender is usually the province of female academics, which I find really problematic).

If I had carried out my first project in Brazil, where there is a foreign language, where there is a long tradition of studying various groups, then my project would have been stamped by that mysterious aura of authenticity/approval. On the other hand, two of the students here (those that worked on free software and the country singer) complained that their papers have yet to be accepted by the Brazilian Anthropological Association for being too strange, non-traditional, and it seems in their case, the problem is that they are studying urban Brazilian, popular culture (which for me would have just been “just” the thing to study). We are located far apart but find ourselves in similar positions by virtue of studying something geographically close to where we live, which is confused and misperceived as being culturally close to our world. But if there is something I wish to hammer into my students and other anthropologists is that there is tremendous plurality and multiplicity within our own societies. We can travel far, in the cultural sense, just by staying home and opening our eyes a little wider.

Another nice experience is that I am learning a tremendous amount about free software politics and development from the graduate student, Luis Felipe, who is really responsible for getting me down here. He found me on IRC many moons ago and finally we have been able to compare notes and have long conversations about free software, the differences in how we can gather data due to gender, and a topic close to me, which is the tension between the political and apolitical in free software.

Our relationship is at once based on friendship and also one of mentoring. And it reminds me of others who have also mentored me and how crucial this mentoring was to the development of my own work. One of my most important mentors, Chris Kelty, just published his book on Free Software (and I will soon write an entry about the book but the WHOLE THING IS ONLINE) and so it felt quite nice that we were discussing what I think his one of his most amazing chapters on the creation of the copyleft in our class on Friday. Not only was the topic about the genesis of the first free software license appropriate for a class on IP, but in many ways, because of his mentoring, I have gotten to where I am and so it felt also appropriate to honor and recognize that genealogy in my own work.

Someone recently asked me whether it was difficult to fill up my syllabus for my hacker course. I wish. The hard part is actually deciding what to put on as there is too much.

This is what I have so far but it will likely change over the summer. I have read a lot of the material but what I most excited about is teaching/reading Richard Sennet’s new book on Craft, which was recently reviewed in depth and in relationship to open source (which Sennet does discuss briefly) by Siva Vaidyanathan in the Chronicle of Higher Education (an article that I co-authored also got some props in the review, which is always nice).

The question of what type of activity programming is a complex and deeply interesting one. Its craft-like roots, in part, have to do with the UNIX tradition, something written about humorously by Neal Stephenson and more seriously by other folks like Peter Salus and Chris Kelty in his wonderful rich chapter on UNIX.

But craft is not enough to understand coding either. The aesthetics of coding also is a literary affair and the two pieces that capture the aesthetics of code in this light are the following two, also on my syllabus:

Black, Maurice
2002 “At the Edge of Language: The Art of Code.” (a PhD Dissertation from the Department of English at UPenn)

Chopra, Samir and Scott Dexter
2007 “Free Software and the Aesthetics of Code.” In Decoding Liberation.

I am excited to review this material, as I need to work through my own chapter on software coding, which is less about the aesthetics of code and more about the tension between collaboration and individualism in production (which obviously maps onto questions of craft and aesthetics but is not quite the same thing).

Miro helps you Mira (watch) Videos in a snazzy and easy to use way. Software like Miro and Zotero is why I free software.

And speaking of videos, one of my readers has provided information about a wonderful documentary on Monsanto and here is a video with Michael Pollan ( an amazing journalist writing on the politics and technology of food) who recently spoke at Google.

A few weeks ago, NYU hosted an interesting event about the future of the Internet, appropriately tittled The Futures of the Internet, the video of which is now available here. One of the panelists was Jonathan Zittrain (who recently wrote an important new book bearing the same name as the event) and during the talk he provided a few ideas about how geeks and developers can help secure the Future of the Internet. While I agree with a lot—in fact most—of his assessments about the state and fate of the Internet as he lays out in his book and his talks, his characterization of geek/hacker/developer politics is not one of them.

Basically, one of Zittrain’s claims is that developers are not doing enough to save the Future of the Internet and it is their rampant, Atlas-like libertarianism, which is, in part, to blame (first made 37:20 minutes into the video for those who want to listen to the actual comments). They have little-to-no “political consciousness,” are “too cool” to care about the “fine print” and they don’t care about the broader politics of the the Internet because they assume that they can just hack around any sort of barrier and impediment.

While we can, without a doubt, identify a strain of libertarianism among hackers, it is by no means representative of all of geekdom and in fact, is becoming more and more a worn out 1990s stereotype/cliché as time passes than an accurate representation of what is a far more variegated set of ethics and practices among hackers (and I will soon publish an article on this topic).

It also completely fails to capture the ethical spirit as well as sociological, and political workings of one of the most important strains of hacking—free and open source software—which not only powers most of our (open) Internet but which in fact has provided a pretty hefty ethical backbone by which to conceptualize one of the ways we should think about the fight for the future of the Internet.

Ok, time for a rant now

Geeks not only designed the Internet, an indisputably revolutionary medium, but also implemented, and continue to maintain it, and then in their copious spare time, also engage in fighting back the political, legal and corporate encroachment which threatens to limit the very revolutionary nature of the Internet (as Chris Kelty’s new book on Free Software argues). If these acts by geeks are not enough political action, then maybe the development of not just one, but multiple entirely open and free alternatives to the only two proprietary operating systems that exist today might be a political act that would satisfy? Many would agree that even simply using a free operating system is a political act. It would be better to claim that individuals, lawyers and other political actors are not doing enough to save the Future of the Internet, rather than imploring the already overtaxed geeks to set aside everything that they are already doing to do something even more.

(end rant)

It also seems that when it comes to political questions related to the Internet, net neutrality being the hot topic now, or fighting restrictive and problematic laws like the DMCA, one of the only groups of people (outside of lawyers and librarians) to actually understand and dissect the fine print (and geeks actually are pretty attuned to and like to dissect the fine legal print), to protest these unsavory laws, and to support the organizations who are doing something about it (like the EFF), are geeks and hackers. While many geeks are not necessarily keen on conceptualizing their labor in traditional political terms, or aligning their technical projects with a political affiliation, and yes would rather just be writing good code, they do fight for their productive freedom and this productive freedom just happens to relate to most questions and concerns related to an open, accessible, and tweakable Internet, built by the geeks, lest we forget

What was perhaps most surprising was that he also seemed to think that geeks and developers have not turned to “apprenticeship,” nor policies and procedure to coordinate their development projects, unlike Wikipedia, which he considers a shining example that geeks should look towards as a beacon of policy that geeks should consider emulating in their projects (comments made answering my question). He clearly has not been hanging out with any Debian developers in the last 10 years nor has he gone through their New Maintainer Process

In other words, he seems to think they are allergic to regulation due to their accentuated libertarianism, or are against structure because of their anarchism, neither which is remotely true. I think I found this characterization most ironic and problematic for before Wikipedia was even an entry on a Wiki, projects like Debian (and most other F/OSS projects) were transforming and changing to integrate normative procedures and policies that allowed a group of people to work together, scale, grow and deal with crises’. No, they don’t have the Wikipedia “badge” system, but that system is emblematic of Wikipedia’s own transformation into integrating its own normative procedures and policies for working together, not an example of an idealized policy system that other projects are too primitive to have evolved into yet.

About one hour into the talk when questions opened up, I objected to his characterization, but given his answer back to me, I did not make much of a dent in his thinking. Another lawyer Tim Wu (who also wrote a wonderful book on the Internet) chimed in to give me some props and also made a good point that even if geeks are the only groups of people who would “storm AT&T” and know intimately about the importance of net neutrality, there is a lot of room for thinking about how to strengthen and improve the tactics and politics among geeks and developers so that we can ensure the type of open and “generative” Internet and set of technologies we value.

As part of thinking and rethinking new strategies, it is as key to acknowledge and honor the past. In this regard, free software development has been pivotal both in terms of providing software (and making it is an important political act as is choosing to use free software over propriety software) and a set of important set of ideas that a lot of lawyers like Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig have run with to make some important political claims of their own.

So despite my rant above, which was a rant and thus exaggerates things to some degree, I do think there is much more that geeks and non-geeks can do, such as help translate these uber-geeky issues into less geeky terms (and actually this is already being done by some geeks as the work of Jelena Karanovic has shown, or translate the technical issues into new domains as the uber-geek Karl Fogel is doing with question copyright but first lets give credit where credit it due and recognize that labor is political

So a few folks left some interesting comments in response to my link to the article on the rise of the alpha-girl based on the research of Harvard psychologist, Dan Kindlon. My response to both Joe and Karl is that it is worthy to lower the barriers to entry not because girls will change the cultural ecology of geekdom in positive ways (though they may) or because geekdom is inherently “omg totally awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” but for a much more mundane reason: it may allow girls to follow interests and eventually discover a passion. I think it is a great idea if more women were involved in geekdom and open source development not because it is inherently great but because I am sure there a lot of women out there who would enjoy it (and by extension, I am sure a lot who would not). By highlighting this article I am not advocating some forced hacker-female-labor-migration-policy but pointing to the fact that social conditions outside of geekdom play a role in ensuring more participation among women. But let me explain a few things before I argue my position a little further.

First a little clarification, especially now that I have read the article. By “alpha” the author does not mean dominant, aggressive, and totally jerky, which is what might immediately come to mind when you read/hear alpha (especially if one knows any alpha-geeks or alpha-lawyers for that matter, who are much worse, imho). And I certainly don’t want any more alpha-anything (alpha-women, alpha-dogs, alpha-cats, alpha-hamsters ) given our world is already chock-full of alpha-jerks. By using the term, the author basically means confidence, which apparently is on the rise among girls, leaving them much more likely to be go-getters, undaunted by explicit and implicit barriers and obstacles and thus more likely then ever to enter arenas that have been thought of as traditionally male or in fact totally dominated by males. If this trend is indeed in place, I think it is great and I hope that this eventually translates into more girls/women populating traditionally male areas whether it is neurology, movie directing, hacking, or surfing.

What I appreciate about the article is that his research can help us question the idea that women are naturally averse to competition due to their estrogenic hormones while boys, brimming with testosterone, just love it and exude it. I never identified with that conventional well-worn script, in part because I guess I am fairly confident and somewhat competitive. Being in academia for the last 10 years, I have witnessed a lot of really confident women that have helped inspire me and keep me going, especially when times got rough.

What is fascinating about the article (and by extension probably his book) is that gender parity and equity and changes in the psychological makeup of women have not changed overnight but have taken a much longer time to settle in place. We are only now bearing the fruits of structural and educational changes first instituted decades ago and that tackled some serious forms of discrimination. As a result, we are seeing girls and women donning a deeper confidence that may help them participate with more success in the arenas they want to whether it be sports or in the workplaces (though there are certainly still major barriers and issues, which are addressed in the article).

So why would someone want to participate in the world of free software and hacking in particular? My first answer is there may be any number of reasons why anyone, female or male or transgender or whatever, may want to do so—for the love of technology, to feel an intense belonging to a community who share your passions and who work together to create something with a lot of value, to enjoy the challenge of learning, to spread freedom to every corner of the earth, etc… It is not that geekdom is inherently fun and exciting but that it will be interesting to some slice of the population—men or women (or other)—and what is the harm in lowering the barriers to entry, especially if it brings enjoyment and frankly a lot of economic security too?

There are a number of girls/women who already find it worthwhile and I am sure many more who would. And the point is not to create some “policy” to make sure that we shuttle women into hackerdom but as a society we should equip them with the necessary psychological tools so that if they think this is worthwhile, and discover that they love it, etc, they will dare to venture in there and more importantly, stay if they want to.

In terms of Karls point that “a lot of people are professional geeks in part because they’d have trouble being anything else; like being gay, it’s not a “choice,” I think that is far too narrow of an assessment, not to mention an outdated caricature of geeks. While there is certainly a class of socially awkward geeks (if that is what you mean??), I would say they are in the minority though they may certainly stand out precisely because they are the odd ducks and because the stereotype is so entrenched. Many geeks I have met, while they may pretty darn focused on geekdom, also have full and rich lives/personalities that cannot be easily collapsed into one immutable personality type. Yes they may be obsessed with tech but aren’t doctors, academics, musicians, lawyers sort of fanatical too? I spend like my whole week working on academic stuff (part of necessity, part out of love). And at least hacking has way better conferences and economic perks, which may help explain why people stay

Finally, I think you assume a little to strongly that we do what we do because we have a pre-formed existing desired to do so. While I think this is the case for many things (and I knew the minute I learned about anthropology, I wanted to be one, which was odd but it proved to be correct), I think desire is also formed as much through experience and hence the importance of exposure to different worlds and experiences. I know that there are many things I could have never imagined I would have loved–karoake and sailing are two things that come to mind—until I tried them about both took some degree of courage. In the later case, it took a lot of guts to move onto some ship at the age of 18 instead of going to college and I am so glad I did. This is an instance where confidence and an initial curiosity led to discovering a love and passion I never knew I had. So if desire can be formed and not just expressed, I think it is key to make sure people have all sorts of opportunities to cultivate the passions they never knew they had.

Seems not so kosher, in a legal sense.

Before I post the longer version…

I am looking for a full copy of the dvd-discuss archives. Does anyone have it??

The Berkman Center, who had been archiving them is no longer doing so!! (hard to believe), even though they have a broken link from this page.

There are some archives I have found but they seem incomplete.

If you have earlier mailing list archives, please please let me know!

update: So thanks to some help I have the earlier archives on the wayback machine but they should be archived on the same spot, no?