The fall semester is right around the corner and I have spent the last week obsessively tweaking my hacker course. I think I finally crafted a syllabus I can live with for the rest of the semester.

I say “live with” because of what I excluded, which I simply did not want to (notably there is no material on DeCSS/DMCA, hacking the I-Phone, and I wanted to do more on encryption). But the good thing is I will be teaching this again in the future and will learn how to rotate in and out some of this material. Now I am off to enjoy a final free day before teaching responsibilities really begin.

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.

Anthropology and the social sciences in general are not at the forefront of thinking of open access in publishing but thanfkfully there is a crew of anthropologists who are thinking about such questions and have some insights about the (sorry) direction our national organization has decided to take. Read more about it here. The interviews are featured in this Cultural Anthropology piece.

For the most part, university websites are not the most flattering in the world, nor are academic conference websites. But this one Copyright’s Counterparts is quite nice (and the theme also interesting). Makes me wonder, actually, about how copyrightable the design of a website is. Does anyone know? update: Not sure why my links don’t work on planet I will have to figure that out after I get back from Canada.Update again: OUCH, ok there are issues with the website thanks to le flash raised in the comments. But I still think it looks good and I am sure that aesthetic could be transfered using non-flash technology!

I love Zotero and now with this new news, my love, I think, will just grow.

A month ago, I picked up a copy of Benjamin Nugent’s American Nerd, and finally got around to reading it the last few days. The prospect of reading an entire book on nerds was exciting—I was a nerd after all—but I have to admit, I was also a little skeptical when I first leafed through the pages. I thought there might be too much auto-biographical mush filling the pages. But I was pleasantly surprised. Within his cool, calm, accessible, and measured prose, there is, to be sure, a dose of autobiographical tales (and this is part of what gives him his “cred”) but these are weaved richly and deftly into a series of ruminations and explanations—anthropological, psychological, literary, and historical in nature—on what makes up a nerd.

What are nerds? Who are nerds? These are the types of basic questions he asks and spends the whole book answering. On the one hand, to be a nerd is as simple and unremarkable (though not so fun) as being designated by others such. Neither ascribed nor achieved status, this form of nerdom is bequeathed by others and accepted reluctantly, if at all.

Yet there is a whole lot more to nerdiness than imputation. First, he explores many types of nerds in relationship to their behaviors and activities (gamers, D & D players, science fiction fans, those that blast to the past through the Society of Creative Anachronism, and even faux-nerds that now populate hipster neighborhoods such as Williamsburg and Wicker Park). Along with giving a window into the lives of these folks, most of whom were probably nerds growing up and still may be sort of nerdy in their behavior, he provides a decent historical genealogy of the word as well as the broader cultural context in the United States that would make a nerd a recognizable figure decades later when it was popularized in print and TV.

To work out how American developed its concept of a nerd,” writes Nugent, “it helps to establish how American arrived at its concept of a sportsman.” He argues that the move from an agricultural to an industrial society helped prompt the rise of sport as a method and cultural marker to “reclaim physical mastery” which was marked somewhat dramatically in the Ivy League institutions that started to valorize sport and masculinity (University of Chicago did not seem to follow the trend and hence it is known as a haven for nerds). Given this overarching context, where masculinity was defined through sport and body, the nerd, culturally speaking, lost out.

The term itself also has a specific history. First appearing in the pages of Dr Seuss as a mythical animal, nerd, it was only later at a fairly nerdy school, RPI, whereby it would take on its current and more familiar usage. RPI published a college humor journal by the name of Bachelor, which started, in the 1960s, to feature a dud by the name of Nurdly and soon after, the term nerd became used for any dud. Thanks to the SNL skits featuring Gilda Radner and Bill Murray, nerd eventually became a house hold name by the late 1970s.

If the term nerd has a recent history, perhaps the importance of Nugent’s book is how it goes elsewhere to help us understand nerdom. One fascinating place he goes is to broader (and often negative) cultural representations of the “Jew” and the racism they faced who were in part discriminated against because of their extreme intellectual dedication, which he argues “suggest Jews sometimes played a role in certain popular imaginations not so different from that of today’s nerd.” He then puts this into play with other discussions of racism such as old fashioned racism against African Americans to make the excellent point that nerds and Africa/African Americans are also in the popularly imaginary, diametrically opposed (and Weird Al makes this same point or reproduces this imaginary here). (more…)

Who knew that rants at Starbucks could be the subject of a seemingly interesting lingustic article.

When you are in a foreign city, Dakar, Tunis, Tokyo, the spaces and sights are disorienting for they unfamiliar. But there are a few spots (hotels, supermarkets), that bring you back the familiar and these places have been theorized by French Anthropologist Marc Auge as non-spaces. Here is a nice interview with Auge on the difference between ethnology, anthropology, as well as his description of non-places:

I tried to characterize these new emerging spaces by the term “non-places” which empirically makes note of the extension of these new spaces in our world; spaces of circulation giving us the sense that the earth is small, spaces of communication (possibly virtual spaces), or even of consumption, since a large part of what circulates aims to put products into circulation (and possibly the men who produce them) such that the activity of consumption reproduces society itself. Such spaces of circulation, of communication and consumption, including the technical capabilities that make it possible for them to be visited or concentrated (the airport, the supermarket, the freeway, etc.), are what I have designated by the term “non-place”.

When it comes to research and writing, anthropologists are notorious for being slow as molasses. It takes, on average, 9 years to finish grad school and then another 3-6 years before you write and publish your first book. Such is the sometimes frustrating pace of academia. But sometimes it is worth the wait as this new book, Two Bits, the Cultural Significance of Free Software by the anthropologist of science and technology Chris Kelty, makes clear.

I am pretty intimate with the details of the book as ck was one of my dissertation committee members. I have read earlier versions and was fortunate enough to teach the final version to a small group of graduate students last spring. While there have been previous books on the subject of open source or peer-to-peer production more generally, this is the first book to delve deep, analytically and historically, into the cultural significance of free software. And the best part is that ck managed (I am not sure how but he did) to convince Duke University Press to release the whole book under a CC license. So download it to your heart’s delight and if you find it useful, do order a treeware copy (as you can’t beat that for easy and comfortable reading).

For the developers out there, I would suggest starting with the introduction, which provides an initial overview of some of the main themes he develops and then I would dig into part two where the historical chapters reside and then loop back to the theoretical chapters in part one or continue to part three.

Trust me, these will fascinate and surprise even those geeks with a relatively deep historical sense of this world. In fact, my very favorite academic piece on free software exists in these pages: and is the chapter on the history of the actual conflict between James Gosling and Richard Stallman that led to the creation of the GNU General Public License. Here is a small excerpt to whet your appetite:

In brief the controversy was this: in 1983 James Gosling decided to sell his version of EMACS—a version written in C for UNIX called GOSMACS—to a commercial software vendor called Unipress. GOSMACS, the second most famous implementation of EMACS (after Stallman’s itself ), was written when Gosling was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. For years, Gosling had distributed GOSMACS by himself and had run a mailing list on Usenet, on which he answered queries and discussed extensions. Gosling had explicitly asked people not to redistribute the program, but to come back to him (or send interested parties to him directly) for new versions, making GOSMACS more of a benevolent dictatorship than a commune. Gosling maintained his authority, but graciously accepted revisions and bug-fixes and extensions from users, incorporating them into new releases. Stallman’s system, by contrast, allowed users to distribute their extensions themselves, as well as have them included in the “official” EMACS. By 1983, Gosling had decided he was unable to effectively maintain and support GOSMACS—a task he considered the proper role of a corporation.
[ . . .]
Indeed, the general irony of this complicated situation was certainly not as evident as it might have been given the emotional tone of the debates: Stallman was using code from Gosling based on permission Gosling had given to Labalme, but Labalme had written code for Gosling which Gosling had commercialized without telling Labalme—conceivably, but not likely, the same code. Furthermore, all of them were creating software that had been originally conceived in large part by Stallman (but based on ideas and work on TECO, an editor written twenty years before EMACS), who was now busy rewriting the very software Gosling had rewritten for UNIX. The “once proud hacker ethic” that Labalme mentions would thus amount not so much to an explicit belief in sharing so much as a fast-and-loose practice of making contributions and fixes without documenting them, giving oral permission to use and reuse, and “losing” records that may or may not have existed—hardly a noble enterprise.
[. . .]

The story is a lively one, punctuated with some great e-mail “moments,” and gives you a play-by-play sense of how it is that free software become so entangled with the law and how the unwritten norms that guided sharing were violated to then become transformed, explicit, and written.

The other chapter that will also fascinate those who want a deeper sense of this history is on UNIX and its role in creating the technical and collaborative conditions necessary to secure the explosion of free software years later. “The story of the norms of sharing source code is, not by accident,” writes Kelty, “also the history of the UNIX operating system.” This connection has been made by others but not shown in any historical detail as it is done in this book.

For those interested in more anthropological issues, the first few chapters is where this type of more conceptual theorizing is at. Chris Kelty introduces the master trope of his book: the recursive public which is an idea that feeds into a longer academic debate, inaugurated by Jurgen Habermas, on the role of publicity, dialogue, and circulation of ideas and texts in cementing a democratic sphere. Many others, such as Charles Taylor, Michael Warner, and Nancy Fraser have since refigured and rehashed the meaning publics and public debate but there have been few ethnographies on the topic. It is here where Chris Kelty intervenes most forcefully to conceptualize publics in explicitly ethnographic terms and in an arena—technology and the Internet—which is often left undertheorized by cultural theorists. There is a lot more in the book (the third section examines some of the various political modulations of free software, such as Connexions and Creative Commons) but instead of saying any more, I will just leave you with his definition of a recursive public and again urge you to check out the book for yourself!

“A recursive public is 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.”

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.