Many moons ago, when I started my project on F/OSS I imagined that it would stay within the purview of anthropology, hacking, science and technology studies to bleed only a little bit into legal studies and only because I was dealing with the fraught politics of intellectual property law. As it turned out, the Law, with a capital L, as on object of analysis and site for the production of cultural value, turned out not to be peripheral but utterly central… And since, I have pretty much stayed within the territory of legal studies, vastly interested in the more invisible cultural and political effects of the law.

Recent obsessing on this topic has led to a nascent thesis about law, discrimination, politics , and civil rights that I am looking to substantiate (so if anyone has any citations or helpful hints, do pass along) and it is this: When there are positive changes made in the law, it can come with various political costs. And the one I am interested in, is how, given other conducive conditions, legal changes that look awesome on paper, can work to undermine its potential by breeding a type of complacency of (in)action, largely because it seems as if the worst of the problems have been fixed. So if we look to the American legal context of 1960s and 1970s as a prime example, it is clear there was a heck of a lot of turmoil in the arena of civil rights, much of which, many liberals and progressives would say, led to positive legal transformation. During this period the content of many laws were purged of overt discrimination that, for example, which led a lethal blow to segregation and started to dismantle some of the worst pieces of scaffolding of mental health law (just to cite a few examples).

At one level while we may easily recognize these changes as laudable and even perhaps “progressive,” the effects of it may be less so. Once legal content is purged of the “ugly,” this can breed an ugly form of complacency, in which the problem seems (re)solved, so people no longer feel guilt and attention is diverted away from any number of things, like: 1) new problems not necessarily addressed in the law 2) the rise of new laws or 3) the fact that the law is empty unless actively applied.

I have yet to read anything directly related to this theory or apply it myself but it is something that has been on my mind for a couple of years now. But after talking about this topic from a friend, I decided to finally take crack at “The Law in Shambles” a Prickly Paradigm Press pamphlet by Thomas Geogheghan, a labor lawyer from Chicago. While it did not specifically address the issue I am raising (though it got pretty close in a number of places) I got more than I had bargained for; it is truly incisive (though frighteningly depressing) look at the current state of the law, and also, like so many of the PPP’s, much more fun to read than any most academic book or articles.

For those who don’t know the PPP publish a series of short pamphlets and it was started by the legendary anthropologist, Marshal Sahlins, who is also known to be a little prickly himself (but it softened by his humor). They are often written by academics on contemporary topics of political interest (read: very biased) in a manner that is a lot looser and free wheeling than any article or book that would come out of an academic journal or publishing house. The PPP allows its authors to unbuckle a few notches off the sometimes uptight, constraining academic belt of writing and the result is often impassioned, funny, and yet remarkably astute essays. If Montaigne were around today, he would surely be proud of his essayistic legacy.

The title of the book sums up the the topic at hand. His explanation as to why the (American) law is in disarray has not to do with the law in the abstract but with the total disintegration of a certain class of institutions and a specific class of law (namely unions , the law of trusts etc.). As institutional supports from the New Deal have been thrown out the door, it is the individual, largely through tort law, who has had to wield the fury of the law, in defense of a slew of individual rights and to defend themselves against new forms of attack (the worst being lawsuits brought forth by “charitable institutions” like hospitals).

While the law is conceived as something we are all equal under, of course, it is access to the law, which makes all the difference in terms of making it a viable (or not) as social tool. With the demise of the unions, he argues, came the death of certain type of contract law in employment, and the stellar rise of tort law, which conceives of wrongful acts not as breaches of contract (which would apply to all persons under the contract) but as matters of personal injury. Whereas in the past unions would arbitrate contract law, wielding the power of numbers so that individuals were not burdened and burned with the expense (of time and money) of the law, with tort the law becomes formalized, conceived, and imagined in highly individual terms (even when grouped into class actions, it becomes a matter of proving personal injury), the effect of which, he argues is “meaner and more complex” than contract for four reasons 1) The name of the legal game is to discover “motive,” which is about as confusing as it can get and thus more arbitrary 2) It is more expensive than old contract law 3) Cases rarely go to trial (didn’t really get the importance of this point) 4) Because its focus is on motive and intense and subjective states, everything is open to scrutiny, so that “I can force you to tell me everything—what is in your secret heart. Not to mention in your tax returns.” The result is torts produced a bitter, dog-eats-dog Hobbesian, legal world, which in turn makes for experiencing the law as an arbitrary force.

This individualization of the law through tort also intersects with many other changes such as the demise of regulatory power that add more fire to the disintegration of the law and the subsequent experience of law and life as arbitrary. And it is this chapter (From Administrative Law to No Law, The Rise of the Whistleblower and Trail Lawyer) which got me a little closer to my own point that I brought up above. For example, he writes:

“Once, when I filed suite to get the Labor Department to enforce the child labor laws for 16- and 17-year olds, kids whom they do not even pretend to protect, I got nowhere. I met with the Solicitor who told me: “Look, suppose I agree with you. How would I ever get the money to enforce it?” He was right. If I had won and they had issued regulations, it would have only been worse. In Labor, as in agency after agency, we have a vast complex body of law—which would take mandarin to learn—that no one enforces.. The law is “there.” On paper. Indeed, it is a lot of paper. How much paper? Fifty volumes, in paperback in total. I know because I counted. But as to big chunks in these volumes, there is no one there to enforce it.” p. 48

Lots of paper I think can make people comfortable in thinking that famous Virginia Slims Slogan, “We’ve come a long way, Baby,” when it fact, it can often just means what it literally looks like, “Damn, that’s a buttload of paper.”

There is a lot more packed into this tiny book, covering the deep gulf between left and right, the stagnation of an old constitution that is impossible to revise, the loss of accountability in all branches of government, the redrawing of districts, and the slight expansion and curbing of of majoritarian voting in the last hundred years. It gets a little shrilly by the end, but you know, it is all pretty upsetting stuff and it is good to shrill from time to time.

Though he never refers to neoliberalism, capitalism, or postmodernism, this book is also a great companion to a class of this literature on the rise of fragmentation and instability in social and cultural life brought forth by changes in the economic system (thinking here of David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, etc). In fact, I think it does a much better job than at relaying how it is that vast sectors of society experience fragmentation, instability, and frustration.

The word on the streets (in my comments really) is that Epiphany may be the future of reliable web browsing so I will have to check it out. I also got an excited email today about a firefox plug-in that is for the (academic) gods: zotero… It looks pretty nifty and handy but since I don’t even use a bibliographic program like End Notes, at least I am not missing out on huge functionality, which reminds me, does anyone have opinions on good GUI free software bibliography programs ?

Mozilla/Firefox in a lot of ways was/is the poster child of free software… I mean do you know how many times I was talking to a certain non-technologically-inclined-person who claimed to not know a thing about open source, and then after I asked what browser they were using and when they said Mozilla, I would let them in on the dirty little secret that they were, in fact, in its very bosom, cradled in and by the rhythm of freedom. And they would gleefully respond with some excited variation of “I had NO idea and I love it… those tabs, those plug ins, that speed….blah blah.” I just loved inducing that reaction.

But for me my love affair with Firefox is officially over. For many years it was a happy, fulfilling relationship but lately, the little red fox has let me down, acting way too erratic, crashing during those inopportune moments, like when opening a pdf, which would cause the whole apparatus to come crashing down, and all those lovely open tabs, with all that information, would be gone in an instant.

For the last 4 months, every time this disdainful event occurred, I would just bemoan and bitch a lot, especially on IRC. Part of me was a loyalist but a bigger part of me was just very very very lazy. With all my bookmarks, with my tool bar, with all my passwords configured JUST RIGHT, I felt enduring the crashes and loss of data was worth it. But no more (admittedly my IRC compatriots were sick of hearing me complain and pretty much demanded that I change).

So now I am going to “rediscover the web” but with Galeon. It is up and running and I have transfered a good chunk of my settings over and over the course of the next few weeks I will make the transition. So far so good though there is work to be done, to be sure, to make Galeon into my new love(ly), web browser.

Trust is on the top on my list of topics of inquiry and I have made it one of my main themes in my writings on Debian. Forbes recently published a small piece on the The Economics of Trust, using trust as an example to explain why Somalias economy barely exists while many in the west, notably the US, are thriving. A little reductive but he has something there because indeed, the level of trust that consumers, investors, and everyone else in the chain has to have to make “it” happen is enormous. However, I am surprised he never mentiones the law in name, and contract law to be specific. He sort of subsumes things under formal mechanisms of trust, but it seems like without the law, there would be no trust… in which case, do we still call it trust? or trust in the law that is the condition of possibility for other mechanisms, which do exist. This topic of trust and accountability in capitalism is something that Weber actually spent a fair bit of time in General Economic History for those interested in such topics.

Yesterday I was catching up with my magazine reading at Chapters (the Canadian equivalent of Border) when I came across an ad for a drug ad for bipolar disorder that struck me as slightly different–less euphoric, more cautious to be exact—compared with the ads that have been bandied loosely in all sorts of magazines in the last decade in the US.

The ad was for a drug called Abilify which must be some verbal riff on Ability (no?) and there was a very clear pronouncement on that ad that admitted they had no idea how the drug even worked. It went like this:

“ABILIFY may work by adjusting dopmamine activity instead of completely blocking it and by adjusting serotonin activity. However, the exact way any medicine for bipolar disorder works is unknown.”

I find this interesting because its tone seems to depart from other ads that seem somewhat more confident (or if they were less so, it was probably kept in the fine print). But when I went to the webpage, this caveat was a little harder to find, as it was a few clicks away within a page entitlted The Brain, Bipolar I Disorder, and ABILIFY . It provides a “handy” pictoral representation of what may be going on with your brain with bipolar disorder/treatment. I found the series somewhat odd and amusing, especially the one that used a magnifying glass to “see” all the neurons and nerves or whatever they are in your brain.

update: so you know, the US and New Zealand are the only 2 countries that allow drug direct to consumer advertising so I am not sure what the ad was doing in this magazine. It was American magazine but in Canada. I would think they would make them get rid of ads like that. Anyone know why it can slip through the border like that?

So people may be wondering, “How does Biella pass her time in the vast, desolate Canadian north?” Thankfully there are many things to do in Edmonton proper, but I have delved quite a bit into reading so I thought I would take a break and give small reviews of the books I have read or am reading as they are all quite good. I am trying to be more systematic about my reading habits so I am back to using citeulike. I am adding anything new I read and then as I go back to I have already read (for articles), I am adding them to the list also. I hope this pays off in the future!

I started the reading bash with a book that was recommended to me over a year ago while I was still in Chicago: The Fugitive’s Property: Law and the Poetics of Personhood as it deals with the bread and butter of my own work, intellectual property, liberalism, market capitalism, and American history. I found the introduction enlivening and was sufficiently interested to continue on. I think there is not a lot of innovative work in the field of intellectual property (only because it has been covered very well) and to bring together slavery/the fugitive person and intellectual property under the same analytical lens, seems productive. Best looks at how the legal treatment of the slave and that of IP, hold striking parallels for their highly “fugitive” (formal) nature, driven and intensified by the legal/market framework that makes personhood into property. There is a lot of good stuff in there (including a fantastic discussion on legal positivism) but in the end, the labor it took to sift through some really obtuse prose was too much for me. I can’t remember the last time I languished under the heavy weight of language that was far too ornate and under sentences that just lacked clarity. This was compounded by the fact that he assumed you knew a fair bit about slave history, which I did not. My drive also escaped me and while I hope to return to it later, I took a break and turned to more readbale material.

After such heavy linguistic ornateness, I needed an antidote, QUICK, and I knew exactly where to go: William Sewell and his book I had on my shelf also nearly for a year: The Logics of History. Along with being a first rate historian he is like that black instrument popularized in the 1980s by the likes of Herbie Hancock, and Brian Eno, he is a synthesizer with an amazing ability to write clearly. Being the synthesizer that he is, he is skilled at connecting the dots between various theoretical topics like event, structure, and agency, making the theoretical implications so crystal clear you feel happy to have entered into a field (the social sciences that is) that feels awfully arcane and pointless at times. I left Stehpen Best, which was like leaving a cluttered medieval castle and into a simply decorated room filled nothing with good theoretical feng shui (I think about writing in spatial terms more than ever). He just makes reading fun, even when the topics can be less than enthralling.

Many of the essays were published previously and I had read a number of them, such as his famous essay on structure and agency. What I appreciated along with the great writing, was that he takes serious the question of plurality of social life within the net of various social, economic, political determinants. So while he assumes the existence of structure (and turns Marshall Sahlins to establish), he also is quick to show that structure, like a cultural system, can only act as partial (and unexpected determinants of social life) because of the existence and presence of events (which is really Sahlins great masterful point) but more importantly because of the plurality of structures… This was perhaps on the the central motifs in my dissertation; while I placed hacking within the cultural lineage of liberalism, in no way is this the only cultural system that hackers operate through and with; they move through a cultural domain more intrinsic to their own praxis, not to mention other systems of value that reverberate more widely among the digerati… And it is this movement between social positions that allows for forms of reflexivity and social change. I primarily used Bakhtin to make this point but now I got Sewell to add to this mix.

Here is a nice passage from the book that makes this point:

I would argue that a multiple conception of structures would make subjects cultural creativity easier to explain. If the cultural structures by which subjectivities are formed are multiple, then so are the subjectivities… Because persons, symbols, and objects of cultural reference overlap between structural realms, structurally generated rules, emotions, categories, and senses of self can potentially be transposed from one situation to another. Indeed, if actors commonly have the experience of negotiating and renegotiating the relationships between noncongruent cultural structures, it follows they should have some intellectual distance on the structural categories themselves, that they should be able to view one set of cultural categories from the point of view of others that are differently organized, to compare and critizise categories and categorical logics, to work out ways of harmonization or odering the seemingly contradictory demands of different cultural schemes. A multiple conception of structure, consequently makes human creativity and reflection an integral element in the theory of history, not a philosophically prior metaphysical assumption. p. 213

And here is a more engaged review that is a little more critical than my very short comments.

As part of a reading group organized by my tireless supervisor, I am also reading The Cultural Locations of Disability written by two of the most prolific scholars in the field, Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell. Since I am a novice in field it is hard for me to judge the two chapters we have so far read but it is a total total total treat reading a book slowly with a group of other folks from a vast range of departments.

So far I appreciate the larger arguments presented in the introduction. For example, they point to two broad categories—capitalism and modernity/enlightenment– as driving forces in a new wave of obsession with the disabled. So while capitalism’s insistence on measuring the worth of humans through an abstract and actual ability to labor, marginalizes those who cannot offer their constant labor power (and makes them an “odd” cultural object), modernity–in its desire to march forward to the mysterious plane of progress, offers a technological promise to eradicate what it designates as deviant or primitive. As they nicely sum up: “In a culture that endlessly assures itself that it is on the verge of conquering Nature once and for all, along with its own “primitive” instincts and the persistent domains of have-nots, disability is referenced with respect to these idealized visions. As a vector of human variability, disabled bodies both represent a throwback to human prehistory and serve as the barometer of a future without deviancy.” p. 31

I, think, however, they should have also included some discussion of liberalism, which in many ways, was the legal and philosophical engine that helped to naturalize capitalism not to mention it also offered a vision of person, in which self-development, expression, and discrete autonomy was deeply cherished. Seen in this liberal light, disability becomes also a type of “tragedy” that can be resolved though new technological interventions they discuss under the guise of modernity.

I have just started Michelle Murphy’s Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers, which promises to be quite a tour de force into the contentious politics of uncertainty and the play of perceptibility and imperceptibility that surround one of many many syndromes—sick building syndrome—that now are part and parcel of the medical and patient advocacy field.

Along with this I read and finished Andrew Lakoff’s Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry, which will make for great teaching, and has one of the nicest discussions on the way in which psychiatry’s insecure status among the other medical science was one of the driving forces toward embracing the new scientism of the 1980s that coincided with new more general neoliberal trends. Another nice move about the ethnography is that he was able to clarify some of the trends and rationalities of American and European psychiatry by examining how it was received and resisted among more psychoanalytical Argentinian therapists. Very classicial anthropological lens in that sesne.

Finally I am in the middle of Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loop and I will say more about it when I am done, which should be soon as I am tearing through it evern night. I have been waiting for this book for a long while now because Dibbell is part of that trinity (Steven Levy, Bruce Sterling, Julian Dibbell) that offers some of the best writing on hackers, the internet, and virtual worlds. And this book continues in that tradition of providing a fantastic read, a vivid ethnographic picture of the topic at hand, along with key insights into the nature of economies, money, and plau within (and outside of) virtual landscapes. What I respect about Julian Dibbell is that he took a long time to get this book out. He started the research in 2003 and then spent a few years writing up. I think there is a lot of pressure to get any material or book on “virtual whatever” out there as quick as possible but for the most part I think that is a mistake. You need to let these things brew a long while or else they won’t acquire that taste of a finished product.

So so so, I finally hit a friend with a Mac to start getting the videos from the Open Minds conference is a compressed state and up online.

So far, I only have David Oak’s keynote speech up in part one and part two.

The sound quality is variable. Since the output from my camera was broken, when I was taping, I was not sure if it was a problem with my sound input, or microphone so I will fiddling with it. I started taping without my external microphone and then I used it and then I stopped and then I used it again. But you can hear it despite the changes in volume!

I may make a higher quality version available later for download for a short period of time.

Since I am “Macless,” it will take a while for me to get the others up. But here at U of A a new fancy Mac Lab will soon open and I will get an account and get at least one video a week up. Or perhaps I will get motivated and do most in one sitting.

Enjoy!

When Cultural Studies released an issue on intellectual property last spring, I was somewhat annoyed and surprised that the issue was not made more freely available, given the topic of the issue. What was more frustarating was the CS has a lag policy for e-access so they don’t make available, even to subscribing institutions, issues until one year has passed. I think this is just a bad move in this day and age. If you can’t download it, well, you will lose a good percentage of your readership. I even ventured to the library 3x to get the issue but alas, it was out every time.

So today I was thrilled to read on Sivacracy that the issue is now available for download. The lineup is great and I look forward to delving in this week.

There are some good comments on the Borsook piece, that rightly point out that the silences to speak of failure were perhaps more of a function of the moment she was doing the research (it just was too early to uncover it) and not necessarily due to a deep culture of shame that permeates high powered Silicon Valley executives (though I like the idea of the later for some reason )

Josh Greenburg also provided a link to the The dotcom archive, which collects the stories of that time period. Really, we are in the age of the archive, aren’t we? Stilt it seems more than ever worth exploring what silences are built into these archives, especially since everything appears to be so accessible and transparent.

This discussion also raises the interesting point, however, of the importance of time and distance to assess the significance of economic trends, new technologies etc. Recently I did a few media interviews with Canadian journalists on the impact of new technologies on political campaigns and advertising. While I have some thoughts on it and it is possible (and important) to think about these topics, my initial reaction is to be highly qualified and cautious because things are too emergent to really say anything firm. I want to tell them, “so give me a call back in like.. 5 years and I may have something to say…”

It is like one of my advisers at University of Chicago said, now that we have pervasive Internet shopping, it is now the perfect time to really understand the significance of the mall… And by unearthing objects of the past, it will help us ground understandings of the present.

After about 6 months of initial research in the Bay Area, I had to make a choice over the future direction of my more directed fieldwork. Would my project be on Silicon Valley, its religious fervor for the exuberant technology start-up, with the geek entrepreneur (probably with some affiliation with Standford) at its center stage, or would it be more broadly about free software and the culture of geekdom? I chose the later, for various reasons, but I think I wanted to write a dissertation that did not bleed with cynicism but instead flowed and flowered with a lot more joy than could have been possible if I had stayed within the grasp of the start-up and the venture capitalist.

That said, I learned a lot about SV, took a lot of notes, and read most anything I could get my hands on whether the work of San Jose Anthropologist,Jan English-Lueck or published in magazines like Mother Jones, Harpers, and even the National Geographic. One of the luminaries that writes about SV from a cultural perspective is Paulina Borsook. And she is fine writer who admittedly has ticked me of on occasion (to be precise because she collapsed too much of geek culture into that of the specific SV world in Cyberselfish, which at the time I found almost personally offensive, probably more than it should have).

Today I just came across a short, older but very illuminating piece of hers “The Disappeared of Silicon Valley (or why I couldn’t write that piece)” which is as much about the limits of historical representation in general as it specifically about the failings of start-ups in SV at the end of the recent boom and bust cycle.

So her goal was simple enough: To find people involved in starting new high-tech whose companies had died.. and to find them to get a more visceral and cultural window into this experience. But it was a near to impossible task. Despite her impeccable record with confidentiality and a far flung social network, she could not get anyone talk about these ostensible “failures.”

There has been a good amount of writing on the limits of historical representation because the archive or what comes to be the archive is a function of power and it is usually the powerless who are left out, as the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot has so eloquently shown. But while it is true that some CEO of a dethroned corporation may be “powerless” in some sense of the word, it is not what we associate with the word.

But in fact, the power of stigma of failure in a region that magnifies an already well-develiped cultural fetish of success (especially, I imagine, among male graduates, of places like Stanford Buisiness School), is enormous, so much so, that it seems one can only write about the experience, as Barsook has done so well, through the reality of a lack, through silence.