After quite a few years of work, revisions, procrastination, and a few life changes, I have finally published a lengthy piece in Cultural Anthropology on code and speech entitled “Code is Speech: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open Source Software Developers, published in Cultural Anthropology. Debian figures pretty prominently as does the arrests of Jon Johansen and Dmitry Sklyarov and the DeCSS Haiku

update: If you have access to a University library, you can get it now. If you don’t, it will be available for free (as in beer) in a few months, and I might also post an uncorrected proof (as I believe I have permission to do so) or can send it to you if you request it. I have posted the pre-print proof here. Since these are the uncorrected proofs, there are a few minor mistakes.

Though published, this is also, much like software, a work in progress as the material represented here will also be in my book and the good news, is I can seriously expand on the issues I have raised. So I am looking for interested readers for feedback, which will thankfully make it in a book that I can post here.

Abstract below:

In this essay, I examine the channels through which Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) developers reconfigure central tenets of the liberal tradition—and the meanings of both freedom and speech—to defend against efforts to constrain their productive autonomy. I demonstrate how F/OSS developers contest and specify the meaning of liberal freedom—especially free speech—through the development of legal tools and discourses within the context of the F/OSS project. I highlight how developers concurrently tinker with technology and the law using similar skills, which transform and consolidate ethical precepts among developers. I contrast this legal pedagogy with more extraordinary legal battles over intellectual property, speech, and software. I concentrate on the arrests of two programmers, Jon Johansen and Dmitry Sklyarov, and on the protests they provoked, which unfolded between 1999 and 2003. These events are analytically significant because they dramatized and thus made visible tacit social processes. They publicized the challenge that F/OSS represents to the dominant regime of intellectual property (and clarified the democratic stakes involved) and also stabilized a rival liberal legal regime intimately connecting source code to speech.

Last spring I secured a Creative Commons license for my book, which is under contract with Princeton University Press. It was was a huge relief for me as I want to publish with PUP but knew there was a serious contradiction if I published a book on Free Software under a copyright license (sort of like printing a Hindu prayer book on leather…).

This article in the chronicle Saving Texts From Oblivion, which opens with a fascinating though unsurprising finding, points to other reasons why an open license is a sensible thing to do, that is, if you want students to read your book:

At a focus group in Oxford University Press’s offices in New York last month, we heard that in a recent essay assignment for a Columbia University classics class, 70 percent of the undergraduates had cited a book published in 1900, even though it had not been on any reading list and had long been overlooked in the world of classics scholarship. Why so many of the students had suddenly discovered a 109-year-old work and dragged it out of obscurity in preference to the excellent modern works on their reading lists is simple: The full text of the 1900 work is online, available on Google Book Search; the modern works are not.

The article, written by Oxford’s editor, has an interesting set arguments about why to support the Google book settlement. It does not, however, really address the question of book piracy, which if anyone has taken a minute to explore, will notice that it is a booming underground economy and the quality of the books is utterly fantastic.

Given these conditions: what will the academic publishers do? No one, at least in academia, wants them to go under and yet conditions have made it difficult for them to survive. I do hope that some interesting solutions, with the financial aid of university support (after all, many are calling for open access) are hacked up.

Calling for tighter copyright controls as this famous judge has done in the case of newspapers is not the path that I hope anyone entertains. In fact, releasing books after a year or two under a CC license might be one path to take, along with providing affordable e-books so that those who do want to support authors and books buy them instead of hitting the pirate stands.

Fieldwork: it is THE method used by anthropologist and is often treated as a loosey goosey set of experiences and techniques, partly because it is. But only partly. If you have ever wanted to read more about fieldwork, my friend Alex Golub has written an interesting account of fieldwork in terms of two realizations.

Here are my slides from the Open Video Conference. I am not sure they are intelligible on their own but I imagine the video of the talk will be up on the site at some point in the near future. It is a basic overview of an article coming out in August in Cultural Anthropology entitled “Code is Speech: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open Source Software Developers (no lolcats in the article though, sadly).

The conference was a real interesting event with some great keynotes, panels, and conversations. I was, at first, surprised at the level of attendance, but it is a testament to the vibrancy of the state and promise of open video. I have a feeling that it will be the first of many.

update Videos of the talk are being uploaded here and a host of the recordings are already up here, which are in a non-flash format and apparently for my talk, they were able to capture a plof (that made me laugh early this morning when i could barely even open my eyes):

“More important: the official registration didn’t capture the sound of a bag of crisps that opened with a loud ‘plof’ on the third row.”

Permissions. Unix geeks know them well as they are constantly handing them out, taking them back. Academics, when it comes to their publishing rights, don’t know what permissions they have or given away. Once you signed the contract you may also have no idea where you filed it, if you filed it.

But now if you want to know, it just got a heck of a lot easier. I was just alerted to a website Sherpa RoMeo that helps you figure it all out! As they report on their front page:

“Use this site to find a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher’s copyright transfer agreement.”

Now that is a nifty tool!

OOOI Vey: Fieldwork is not what it used to be! So, when I hear the title of this new book, I basically hear/see an old Jewish academic kvetching about the glory days of anthropology and fieldwork and complaining about his aching back. But that is just my mind in humorous mode as I am extraordinarily excited to read the book and pretty psyched that fieldwork is not what once was.

Not only does the collection have a piece by one of my dissertation advisors but it has a motley collection of folks who basically helped push along anthropology to a better place. Most of them (in fact all of them, I think) had some connection to the Rice Anthropology department. Clearly something in the water and air makes folks from there hang tight with the experimental mode!

So I am struck by two opposing forces that characterize so much academic labor. Basically academics spend a lot–and I mean mounds–of time judging their peers. It happens informally (“blah is smart” “blah gave such a crappy talk at the MLA”) and formally (journal reviews, book reviews, letter of recommendation, tenure letters and it goes on and on).

While there is certainly a middle ground in judgment in the form of constructive criticism (that which is neither too critical or full of praise), much of this labor is uber-critical and geared toward tearing down and scorching the intellectual earth you walk on. You should read some of the journal reviews! They are a window into some pretty seething nastiness, or at least it comes across as such.

But thankfully scorn, which sometimes is pretty humorous, other times spot on, and other times, just pitiful, sits at the edge of full blown, often overblown, PRAISE. You can find it in journal reviews but it reaches its Whole Hog Glory in letters of recommendation. These letters are all about buttering up, buttering people up to present them as god’s gift to earth or something similar.

I rather enjoy reading and writing letters of recommendation because basically the content is the same (I know blah in this capacity, they are full of nothing but alien-like intelligence and total awesomeness, for these reasons, this is why they are perfect for your program) but the words and style, well, they are always different. And I frankly I just feel good reading them and writing them. Perhaps we have to praise so exuberantly to keep the two forces in cosmic balance.

Something I have been thinking a lot about lately is why social science and humanities journals have been slower to move toward the land of open access in comparison to the ‘hard’ sciences. There are a few obvious reasons but there are others which are still a mystery to me.

I understand why existing journals can’t easily pry away from established relations and obligations so I am not all that surprised that these journals, whether in the ‘hard’ sciences or ‘soft’, have not gone open access. But perhaps newly minted journals are in better position to start right off the bat with an OA agreement. This is what the International Journal of Communication recently did and I am sure there are other examples.

So today I was disappointed to find out that the following new Anthropology journal theJournal of Legal Anthropology has seemingly gone down a traditionalist copyright route. But I don’t just want to point fingers here as I know editors are often in a very difficult position when seeking sponsorship and support for a new journal. That is, achieving OA, I understand is no walk in the park. And yet given their mission and given that it is a legal journal, it also makes sense to have some sort of open format:

“International in scope, we hope it will be accessible beyond a specialist legal anthropology area and, in practice, both widen what is understood within the discipline of anthropology as legal and position the legal as also ‘socio-cultural’ in terms of contemporary anthropology. The journal is produced by anthropologists interested in making anthropology accessible (translatable) in other settings and disciplines, and by legal practitioners with support from academics working in human rights, conflict and related areas”

A walled garden is not suited for the flowers of access to grow. But perhaps they tried and failed. If this is the case, it would also be good to learn of these experiences, which can be used in future cases to pave the path toward greater access.

Wow, this looks like a real cool research project. Wish they had included some photos as well.

glisten vs hardened words, originally uploaded by the biella.

Now that I am (thankfully) done teaching until September, I have time to devour two small mountains of readings that I need to finish before I return to my manuscript, which I will be working on, I hope uber-productively, all summer long. One pile of readings deals with coding, open source, and the commons, such as Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code and David Bollier’s Viral Spiral. Another pile of reading edges toward the theoretical side of things, having to do with craft, pleasure, and humor, since it is pleasure in its many many many guises—from from the calm feeling of self-satisfaction that underlies pride in one’s craft, to the more sublime feeling of ecstatic bliss—that powers many creative sprints.

If one entertains pleasure, one must also entertain its darker side, for all of this “feel good” stuff is nonetheless often springs forth from a deep sea of passionate frustration. This seems to be the driving theme of Dreaming in Code and it is also what animates Ellen Ullman’s fictional account of pure frustration, The Bug. I am quite fond of “native” expressions of geek frustration and recently was provided with an exquisite example—a rant against the Adobe PSD format. The author of Xee, “A light-weight, fast and convenient image viewer for Mac OS X” explained his utter contempt for the Adobe PSD in the following way:

 At this point, I’d like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format. PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns. If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide that *these* particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement should *not* be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned, or aligned with the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included.

Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch them on a spaceship directly into the sun.

Even if this account represents unadulterated irritation, he leaves us, the reader, with nothing of the irritation, only pleasure. This aftermath of frustration is delivered through the vehicle of humor, which within the hacker context, is the cultural container that best captures the spirit of hacker pleasure or so I will be arguing. Like many humorous rants from the world of hacking (and please send me any others you know of), this text dances with liveliness; it exudes its own rhythm; it “glistens” to use Ronald Barthes’ apt phrasing from his short book “The Pleasure of Text,” which I just finished as part of my theoretical escape into the pleasure-dome.

Although there are parts of his book which are to be frank, *really* *not* *pleasurable*, partly due to obscure references to High French Theory, which elide even an academic pair of eyes, the book generally pleases. And one of the most pleasing chunks is his definition of a stereotype:

“The stereotype is the word repeated without any magic, any enthusiasm, as though it were natural, as though by some miracle this recurring words were adequate on each occasion for different reasons, as though to imitate could no longer be sensed as an imitation: an unconstrained word that claims consistency and is unaware of its own insistence”

In contrast to the stereotype, a string of words that enchants does so by slipping off the page to hit you squarely in the heart or the gut. Unfortunately, while academic writing steers clear of stereotypes, often trying to present the detailed singularity of a phenomena (even when conditioned by social forces), it does not exactly “glisten,” though there are a handful of exceptions. I think we need more texts that glisten, even if only during sections or parts of our books and articles (much like the rant helped enliven the more staid technical document).

In recent years, in large part due to the influence of free software, there has been an explosion, a move toward going open access. All of this is laudable and I fully embrace it (and have gotten into some small battles over it). But without an aesthetic politics that values pleasure in reading and writing we are doomed to obscurity anyway. A move toward making our knowledge public also required a move toward thinking about the literary aesthetics of pleasure.