I just got back from 4S, which happens to be one of my favorite of the “large” professional association conferences. Ok, 15 minutes to deliver talk is the equivalent of being treated as canned sardines, and thus totally unpleasant, but I feel like I can go to most any talk and find it relevant or interesting to my own work. I t is certainly more manageable too in terms of size than something like the AAAs which also gives you a paltry 15 minutes to present and worse, the association has been treading in some ethically problematic territory lately, so much so, I would rather throw my money to the other AAA.

While in Vancover, my Internet access was near to nothing (I was staying with a friend who I have not seen since the summer of 2002, but alas, thanks to chatting we have been in pretty consistent contact). When I came back I came across some discouraging but not so surprising new news on the AAA and their cowardly decision to fight the FRPAA that would mandate open access for articles derived from federally funded research… The cherry on top of the cake was they dissolved the AnthrSource Steering Committee formed precisely to figure out how to open up access, no less!

Alex Golub, a Savage Minds blogger, and a now ex-member of AnthroSource committee has written an excellent roundup of the story (link above) and Peter Suber, also has two very nice summaries, including links to the appropriate documentation.

This year since I am curtailing my time on the conference circuit, I decided not to go to the AAA conference because frankly I am totally annoyed with the professional organization. I am usually quite proud to be or at least amused after I tell folks that I am am anthropologists (most react as if I had decided to embark on some real courageous path) but I am quite embarrassed about the association that is supposed to represent my interests and the profession at large.

The links on SM point to and flesh out the problems with AAA’s refusal to jump on an exciting opportunity to free up some knowledge but I want to just emphasize three of the most problematic parts of their decision:

1.The most offensive part is that in reality the proposed bill is quite conservative in so far as it only asks for what should already be (a) given. That is, if the government is using tax dollars to fund research, it has every right to demand the fruits of such scholarship is made available to tax payers. Right? Given the neoliberal moment we are in, in which the government is retrehcnhing on all sorts of supports, this bill is admirable and I am afraid that if it does not pass it can be easily used by conservatives to justify future cuts of such funds. And given the very uncontroversial nature of the bill, it is not surprising that so many of the social science and humanities associations did not protest the bill… Anthropology sticks out as a sore sore thumb in fact.

2. The AAAs deployed FUD tactics to justify their position saying that open access would jeopardize peer review… Sigh. That is just so off the mark and the AnthroSource steering committee letter addressed this point well.

3. Many anthropologist know first-hand how appalling access outside of Europe, US, Australia, Japan etc, can be, even for academics and thus, AAA’s lack of support for this is also implicitly sanctions the “North” “South” Division that have plagued the field and all of academia so long. And for a field that has often been very thoughtful about these power/knowledge dynamics, it is doubly even more stinging… Is there really such a strong disconnect between the association and discplinary ethical currents?

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.

I have made it to South Africa and the official part of the Law and Society conference has come, sadly, to an end. It has been an amazing experience for reasons that deserve a lot more attention than I have right now so I will wait to write some about it when I have more time.

But before I forget, Lars has been thoughtful enough to put the Debian History Roundtable Discussion on the Debian Wiki.

I organized this roundtable at Debconf4 and while there is a good chunk of information from the discussion, there is a lot missing and perhaps even wrong, so please make changes and additions.

As soon as summer hits, my muse takes an extended vacation and I only write sparingly and occasionally (and somewhat painfully without the muse).

But as soon as I read and heard from a number of places, notably Savage Minds that the American Anthropological Association is lobbying against open access, I decided to work against my disinclination to write to say a few words. Rex at Savage Minds, as well as others have already covered thoroughly and thoughtfully, the basic issues as well as why it is incredibly problematic for the AAA not to endorse what is an otherwise powerful and positive Federal initiative that would require final mauscripts based on federally funded research to be accessible to the public after 6 months. So I wont be redundant here and will keep this short, but I would like to say that in an era in which government roll-backs (and in nearly every quarter of life) are simply commonplace and causing a fair deal of social problems, any initiative in which there is a push to make scholarship, *based on federal funds*, public and accessible, seems imperative to support, not squash. Many anthropologists, as probably many scholars, I imagine,like to think that some of their work has some public import and as such, we should do everything possible to make the work as accessible as possible, which will also give access to the communities and people we work with. They mention the supposed threat open access will have to peer review. First I don’t think that arguement stands up and more important, if peer review is simply a self-referential exercise, in which it can’t happen in a context of openness and accessiblity, what good is peer review??

Given the recent AnthrSource Initiative, as well as the general open/populist/ liberal/downright radical political inclinations among anthropologists, and the fact that the discipline in the last 25 years has been somewhat obsessed with the question of ethics, I was quite shocked at this move. But apparently (and thankfully) there were very few people at the AAAs behind the decision, which is somewhat comforting. What I hope now ensues is the formation and expression of a very strong response among the members of the AAA asking for a response from our elected board and an eventual rethinking of this stance.

Anne Galloway, as usual, has a nice discussion on her blog, this time around, using Bruce Sterling’s recent keynote at the Emerging Tech Con, to get at the question of power, empowerement, and dispowerment of words

Bruce Sterling has posted his Emerging Tech talk and I’m still fixated on his fixation on words. This whole rationale behind coining neologisms interests me, and particularly how he understands terms like ‘internet of things’, ‘spimes’, ‘theory objects’, ‘everyware’, ‘thinglinks’ etc. are being mobilised to replace (with varying successes) what he considers to be no-longer-adequate terms like ‘ubiquitous computation’. I think he understands perfectly well how much this is all language games and image wars, and he’s playing for all it’s worth.

So one fun part of being on the job market is that you delve into some serious course constructions. I have come up with 4-5 courses and I will soon start to put some online to get some feedback. Since most of my recent posts here have been on liberalism and neoliberalism, here is one of the my proposal courses, called The Cultural Life of Liberalism. It is still under development though I like the overall structure of it. I would appreciate any suggestions.

Yesterday I had the chance to briefly meet Rutgers Anthropologist Angelique Haugerud who is doing some really fascinating work on paraody and protest (on, for example on the The Yes Men). And I just noticed that she is teaching a graduate seminar on Globalization and Neoliberalism, so of course, I will mine that syllabus when I have a chance to look at it.

I just finished reading an article written and recommended by David Berry that he mentioned on my blog: The Contestation of Code: A preliminary investigation into the discourse of the free/libre and open source movements. The piece does a marvelous job at running a fine comb over the terms that dominate the discourses of open source vs. free software and in so doing, brings into stark relief the differences between the two philosophies. For example, while free software promulgates a host of terms like code, freedom, power, progress, community, and rights—knotting them together into an ethical package that includes community, public good, ethics, and Enlightenment ideals of progress—open source uses a different set of meanings to animate some of these same categories and places them into a different package, one that includes the language of choice, markets, rational choice, individualism, and efficiency. And as Berry argues persuasively, Eric Raymond hitches these within an evolutionary framework that “seeks to give deterministic causes” (p. 79).

I tend, however, not to treat these as two movements, “that differ radically in their underlying philosophies” (p. 67), but more as movement that exhibits two positions that maps to a continuum rather than a stark dichotomy; and these reflect the differences and points of tension that are always part and parecel of any shared movement or tradition.

Elsewhere I have written about hackers, in general, and free and open source software, in specific, as a means to examine the heterogeneity of the liberal tradition, all too often treated in unitary terms. While free software draws on the communitarian end of the liberal spectrum, OSS sits at the other pole. According to Raymond, OSS’s virtues follwo from the fact that the enjoyment of programming and the reputation programmers derive from doing it well–these are simply better incentives to produce good software than a salary. While Stallman envisions a community maintained through shared norms and values (and sits more closely with folks like Jefferson and Mill and also perhaps has anarchistic influences), OSS hearkens back to thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment such as Mandeville.

That said, the reason I don’t see these as radically distinct, however, has less to do with these two positions, which really do, as Berry shows so well, diverge into different ethical territory, but because at the level of ordinary social life, most developers I met and interviewed, even those from the Debian project (the most ethically committed to free software), expressed and dabbled in hybrid discourses that included language from both camps. For many of these developers, free software development was the more efficient thing for their technical art, and also held moral overtones. For many, free software/open source could guarantee a more open market. For many developers who chose open source, they chose copyleft licenses because they were personally motivated and compelled by deep seated ethical beliefs, but were eminently uncomfortable with passing on such moral to others. Others really disliked any whiff of moralism. Many developers were very uncomfortable mapping this realm to any politics outside that of software freedom and when they did, they inhabited a “recursive” political reflexicity as described by Chris Kelty. But many free and open source advocates did move comfortably between these two poles, sometimes choosing one label over an other one to make a point or to emphasize one facet of what one label could only thinly capture.

Berry also claims that “Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is the exemplar of the vision of Raymond and the OSM,” (p. 81) which I think can be thought of in a slightly different way, perhaps as a third way. First, his rise to prominence as the leader of the first large scale free software project came well before the birth of open source discourse. Certainly, while Stallman was a political crusader salvaging culture, Torvalds was a technical pragmatist who worked from home and was receptive to feedback from peers through newsgroups. But by following his hobby and using a free software legal scheme, Torvalds accidentally inaugurated a unique global volunteer project of “collective invention” whereby programmers could contribute bug fixes and improvements that, if deemed worthwhile by Torvalds would be incorporated into new versions of the Linux kernel. In the process of rewriting the kernel, Linus became a leader, coordinating the contributions of all those who were willing to volunteer their time. His innovation was as much social as it was technological. And to be more specific, he inaugurated a strain of populism, that was later carried into and accentuated into other projects such as the Debian project. Over time, Linux as a project did move more toward the open source camp, but still retains a healthy doses of its early populism that defined a new era in UNIX hacking from its predecessors (such as with the Berkeley Software Distribution camp) whom operated along a more elitist logic. Below is one older Debian developer who is describing contributing to BSD before the Linux era:

There was a process by which you wrote some code and submitted in the ‘I am not worthy, but ‘I-hope-that-this-will-be-of-use-to-you supplication-mode’ to Berkeley and if they kinda looked at it and thought, oh this is cool, then it would make it in and if they said, interesting idea, but there is a better way to do that they might write a different implementation of it.

While the Berkeley Unix gurus accepted contributions from those who were not already participating on the project, it was difficult to pierce the inner circle of authority and become an actual member of the team. When Linus Torvalds and Ian Murdock developed their own projects (the Linux kernel and Debian respectively), they did things differently than the earlier cadre of Unix hackers by fostering a more egalitarian environment of openness and transparency.

I think the most interesting claim brought on by Berry is that open source discourse is a neoliberal one. On the one hand neoliberal language and open source language do share many similarities, that of choice and free markets most notably, but I think open source, especially as it is carried out in the vicissitudes of social practice, falls short of neoliberal ideology (but, to be sure, can be easily changed into those terms and thus I think of them more as holding affinities).

Because while a neoliberal worldview unabashedly promotes the privatization of every last thing, even open source states there must be limits. And just this claim, alongside a healthy and somewhat contagious (in that good sort of way) social practice of collaborative development, undermine neoliberal ideology and especially neoliberal trends in IP law. As Siva Vaidhyanathan has written elsewhere “the brilliant success of overtly labeled Open Source experiments, coupled with the horror stories of attempts to protects the proprietary model have added common sense” toadvocates fighting for reform and change. The way open source has functioned, at least it seems to be, is more than less, as a break, a limit point to neoliberal trends. I am still open to thinking more about open source as part and parcel a neoliberal creed, but I would like to see more of those discursive and sociological links and if we are to call that neoliberal, what do we call the massive transformation of IP law that have been intimately linked these modes of regulation to trade treaties and the like? I guess I am not ready to tag open source as neoliberal as that term helps to explain other trends in IP law.

If you can’t notice from the post, I am in the thick of major dissertation revisions for a book manuscript so am gladly reading more about free and open source to get me through some of my hitches.

The list of things I want/need/should (or should not) blog about are piling high and they range from the insignificant though unbelievable footage of an octopus gorging on a shark, to a long bit on the “Tale of A Tub” workshop that I attended last week at Rutgers (an amazing book).

But all of this will have to wait as my plate is overflowing. But, before I forget, I would like to point out for those who work on psychiatry, gloablization and medicine, or for those who just want to read what looks like a promising STS-Anthro ethnography, Andrew Lakoff’s book
Pharmaceutical Reason has finally been released! I have been wanting to sink my teeth in for a while now and I am sure it will be a tasty read.

Andrew Lakoff argues that a new ‘pharmaceutical’ way of thinking about and acting upon mental disorder will reshape the field of psychiatry. Drawing from a comprehensive ethnography of psychiatric practice in Argentina (a country which boasts the most psychoanalysts per capita in the world), Lakoff looks at new ways of understanding and intervening in human behavior. He charts the globalization of pharmacology, particularily the global impact of US psychiatry and US models of illness, and further illustrates the clashes, conflicts, alliances and reformulations that take place when psychoanalytic and psychopharmacological models of illness and cure meet.

A couple of weeks ago, at the CCA we had the pleasure of having a guest speaker: David Post. A law professor (and so much more if you read his bio) from Temple University, he writes on issues related to freedom and cyberspace. He is now working on a book, tentatively titled Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace (check out some sections here. )

As he explained, the book uses a Jeffersonian framework (apparently Jefferson was quite interested in how to make the republican nation “scale” and he used the natural world as his guide), to think about the nature of the Internet and questions of scaling. At some point during our discussion, he referred to Jefferson as “the patron saint of hackers.” I, of course, got incredibly exicted when he said that (mostly because it was so right on and so darn eloquent too), but also because it captures how liberal ideals, live on, in radically different contexts. Of course most hackers and geeks have not read Notes on the state of Viriginia (Jefferson’s only book) nor do most house a small corner candlelight shrine of Jefferson atop of their Linux box (though perhaps they should).

But some of his most well known ideas, continue to have salience (you know, the famous, That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. “)

The fact that Jefferson acts a potent present-day icon demonstrates one example of how long-standing liberal values become practically articulated and revisioned. Of course they change, and the reasons for which TJ may act as a signpost often has more to do with present day conditions, than those of the past, but his example, and his ghost existence all over the web, is one way to think of both the cultural life of liberalism as well as the continuities, as well as transformations, with liberalism of times past.

Greg Lastowka , another fellow at the CCA, is also interested in cyberlaw, freedom, and all that good jazz and he recently passed along an article, Would Jefferson have googled? reporting on a speech by U of Michigan president Sue C. where she argues for the importance of Google Print.

All of this talk of liberalism and culture, reminds me that I should post a class syllabus I have recently developed “The Cultural Life of Liberalism” that is a first attempt to broaden the ways in which anthropologists approach liberalism as a cultural formation (outside of questions of multiculturalism, which has been covered quite exquisitely). Hopefully it will be up in the next few days and I can receive some feeback.

After Culture (warning, link to journal directs you to microsoft.com but the journal looks interesting, nonetheless).

Description
Papers are sought for the inaugural volume of a new peer-reviewed journal, “After Culture: Emergent Anthropologies.” The first issue is planned for release in September 2006, and thereafter will be published semiannually (in March and September) and made available free through the internet (URL forthcoming). We are currently seeking article manuscripts which focus on the interactions between nature, culture and society, or are in the general thematic areas of science and technology studies or critical studies of medical knowledge and practice. Contributors are encouraged to employ any form of rigorous theoretical and methodological approach, not limited to ethnography, historiography and textual analysis.

update: the link now works