If there is one thing that drove me a little nuts about my fieldwork, it was trying to get a very precise handle over the reasons that hackers loved to joke about the existence of a cabal. On the one hand, the joke’s significance was obvious: hackers distrust centralized authority so any whiff of it will attract attention, and joking about the so called existence of a cabal is at once a reflection of this unease and a mechanism to remind those with power that they must always act with good intentions and defer to the group when it comes to technical decisions.

But in fact joking about the cabal opens up into a much vaster savanna related to the tensions between elitism and populism in hacking, as well as the general potential for meritocracies to degrade into corruption. While hackers distrust centralized authority, they do happen to trust those who have proved their worth to peers (though a combination of talent and dedication) and dole out respect and recognition to them. Often this means that some folks will eventually be entrusted with some sort of technical role, and thus, power and this is fine so long as he does not block the process of open ended debate and deliberation by which they achieved power in the first place. I address the question of the cabal and meritocracy in Debian here and am soon going to release another chapter of my dissertation that takes a closer look at the tension between populism and elitism.

But of course there is a much longer history of the general corruptibility of meritocracy (check out Plato’s Republic for an old examination of this problem and if anyone knows of more current accounts of it, please feel free to email me) and of cabal joking within hacking. Just recently I came across a really good piece on free speech, populism, and elitism by Bryam Pfaffenberger: If I want it, it’s OK: Usenet and the (outer) limits of free speech

This piece is not only a solid history of early Usenet, but gives us a clear window into how the value for freedom and free speech grew on the Net, and through very particular conditions (behind the backs of academic, corporate managers and administrators, for example), the enablers and constraints of newsgroup technologies, and of course the unavoidable fact of contingency. Moreover, this commitment to openness grew in the midst of a tension between what he calls the “ethos of collaborative egalitarianism” and the elitism of the wizards who controlled the backbone of Usenet. He sums it up nicely here:

“In spite of Usenet’s implicitly antibureaucratic ethos, it was soon apparent that sites could not function unless someone took responsibility for the many administrative tasks involved, such as placing the late-night calls (and disguising phone charges). UNIX system administrators (abbreviated sysadmins) soon came to have more or less officially recognized Usenet-supervision roles within companies, organizations, and universities they served. This role has never been a particularly happy or easy one. Sysadmins had to balance the needs and interests of their organizations against the ever-more-voracious appetite of Usenet—and later.., they had to deal with the conviction of many Usenet users that Usenet gave them the right to speak and distribute anything they liked” p. 370

For anyone interested in how the net became such a hotbed for the fever of the flavor for the free(dom/speech), this is a must read. In this piece, what comes out so strongly is that the tension between elitism/hierarchy and populism/openness is of course not just a function of social norms, but emerges out of the very contradictions of technology but technology-in-use. Though Usenet was first envisioned as a forum for discussing Unix and providing technical support, it soon burst out of the early seams of its intended birth to become a more global, unwieldy entity. But there were still those with the technical power in charge to manage the network, assign accounts, delete controversial newsgroups and so on. Eventually geeks themselves led a mini-revolution to democratize access (which meant really control over the means of production).

The problem between elitism and populism has not left the halls of geekdom yet but there are certainly more technologies than ever that tend to allow, in potentia at least, for a type of equality than before. And getting a hold on this early history helps clarify the problems and issues of today.

My friend Sareeta is teaching a class on Technology in India, which looks fanstastic. If you are an undergraduate student at U of C, I would not miss it!

Here is the class overview:

Course Overview: Indian Technologies

How has technology shaped the Indian nation-state? How does our understanding of the meaning of technology change when discussed from the perspective of India? These two questions will serve as guides for the duration of this course on the relationship between technology and Indian political society. Seminal readings on technology inaugurate the course. Starting with Heidegger’s distinction between techné and technology, we will discuss the philosophical notion that those objects that mediate the relationship between humankind and nature contain both a promise and a threat—the promise of the full development of human capacities and the threat of the destruction of humanity. We will then consider Foucault’s analysis of techniques of political power through his concept of governmentality. This concept will reappear later in the course when we examine the cases of slum clearance, census, and population control during week 7’s discussion of Emma Tarlo’s Unsettling Modernities, an historical ethnography of the Emergency. Marx’s writings on alienation and industry labor round out the first set of readings, providing us with a theoretical tool kit with which to approach the particular histories of technology in India.
Gandhi and Nehru had in the main opposing views on the benefit of technology to India. The readings for the second and third weeks of class put their views in the context of Indian nationalism and the British Raj. From here we move on to investigate the causes and consequences of industrial and agricultural development by considering Akhil Gupta’s book about the Green Revolution and indigenous agriculture, Postcolonial Developments, and Veena Das’s seminal essay on the relationship of the industrial disaster in Bhopal to ideologies of the nation-state, “Suffering, Legitimacy and Healing”. The authors take up our twin themes of promise and threat and apply them to the future and fate of a free and democratic India.
Mid-quarter, we consider the development of India’s nuclear bomb. These readings reflect the place of science in the national imaginary of India, and situate developments in India in an international context. In the next set of readings, we explore how traditions of governance developed under the Raj vis-à-vis colonial subjects continue to influence the Indian state’s relationship to its subaltern citizens. The readings for this week both help expand the notion of technology to include techniques of enumeration and classification, and interrogate the nature of post-colonialism. Arvind Rajagopal’s ethnography, Politics after Television, illustrates the role of new technologies in political mobilization. It makes the argument that television as a tool of politics also corresponds to a new kind of voting Indian public. We will use these readings to open up a debate on the nature of democracy and its relationship to new technologies. The penultimate set of readings addresses a much-lauded but little understood technological phenomenon, the Indian software boom. The question of the legacy of Nehruvian technological projects will be revisited and the relationship of computer technologies to inequality will be explored.
In the final week, we will review materials covered in the course and test their limits. Marx’s writings on the British in India will be posed as a problem to any critique of technology that seeks to apply his theories unaltered to India, while Vidhu Verma’s article on gender and development will be used to re-think our readings on economic and technological progress.

Anthropologists all fear two related things: that we won’t collect any interesting data and if we then proceed to do so, one day it will vanish either in flames, following a computer break down, or theft. This fear perhaps used to be more acute before the digital era, when pen and paper were your only recourse to inscription. One copy in existence meant that if it was lost, well, you were in deep trouble (except if you are Edmund Leach and
Max Gluckman who also lost their field notes for projects and look where that GOT THEM ) Since the photocopy machine, copies could be made and with the computer, multiple copies and backups can be secured.

But there are new dangers for losing data in the golden age of computing having to do with a piece of technology that hackers love to loathe, Digital Rights Management which is usually not the prime concern of anthropologists, but of geeks and other netizens.

However, it is something that anyone who uses digital technologies for data gathering and recording, should really care about. The story below is from a fellow University of Chicago anthro grad student whose data was lost through a hard drive crash. He of course made backups, like any sensible person should do. But since he had to transfer the backups to a new computer, the hardware does not recognize it, being that it can only be used on the original harddrive where it was first placed. Below is the full story. If anyone is interested in cracking this format, or any solution, don’t hestitate to email me as this person is still actively looking for soltutions to this problem.

The story is basically as follows. I’ve been using a Sony Minidisc to record interviews and various other events for the past year, for my dissertation fieldwork. After recording anything, I would come home, transfer the files from the Minidisc onto my laptop, back them up on a CD, and just for safety also on a secure server. I would then delete them from the minidisc. About two weeks ago my HD crashed, looks like a mechanical problem. It would just go dead or restart a few moments after being turned on. A couple of times it lasted just long enough in windows to let me see that the files were all still there, and even open a couple. At a computer lab here they first formatted it, because I told them I had all my important data backed-up, which I thought I did. They realized then it was beyond redemption, and installed a new HD instead. I still have the old one, but it’s now both a mechanical problem and the discs being formatted. After re-installing everything on my new HD and recovering all my backups, I imported the audio files into SonicStage 3.2, which recognized them and added them to it’s library, but wouldn’t let me play them or do anything with them. The files are in Sony ATRAC3 and ATRAC3-Plus formats, with .oma and .omg endings. SonicStage either tells me the there is invalid rights management information in the OpenMG content (for .omg files), or first asks me whether I would like to connent to the internet to download the license for the content, and then gives me the message about invalid rights information (for .oma files). Another program, HiMDRenderer, which can convert ATRAC3 files into wav, also doesn’t let me convert the files or access them in any way. Audio I’ve recorded with the minidisc and imported into my computer after installing the new hard-drive works fine – I can listen to it in SonicStage or convert it to wav. I also tried installing the atrac codec and use sndrec32 to play it, but this won’t work either. In internet forums I’ve seen other postings of people who had similar problems, it seems like the Digital Rights Management system only allows certain files to be played on the original computer, and renders them unreadable elsewhere.

The folks at the Paris IMC translated and published an IMC piece I wrote a while ago. They have added a nifty translation notes section where they tackle those words that are difficult to translate from one language to the next, among other things.

I finally got around to signing up on SSRN where I published my dissertation chapter on Debian in article form. It was remarkably easy to do, which is always a nice +++ when throwing stuff online.

Now that I am nearly settled down, I think I will have time this coming week to put the whole dissertation online..

Joseph Reagle, a PhD candidate at NYU researching the Wikipedia community, recently wrote a blog post that asks a set of methodological and theoretical questions about the nature of his work, questions relevant to anyone that studies online communities: is it an ethnography of a current phenomenon, a set of oral histories, how does one portray and (or not) anonymize the people he works with? He raises my chapter on Debian (as well as some other work I would love to check out), in part, to address these questions and in particular, my strange treatment of sources. While I anonymize interviews as well as irc conversations (by changing names, for example), I use the names of the real developers when referring to public events and quote email mail lists but without the url. I think the lack of the last choice was indeed strange and perhaps not the wisest one. I think I made it clear that the source was a mailing list but for some reason I did not provide the URL to give it some visual consistency with the interview quotes, knowing that if someone wanted to find it, they could type a small section in google and retrieve the message. In retrospect, I should have just used the URL and when I post the paper on SSRN I will add them.

I had a really tough time deciding whether to anonymize everyone, just those folks that asked to be anonymized, or do something all together different. I have read material on F/OSS where even the names of projects were changed but the instant you googled the mailing list quote provided in the chapter, you could find out who wrote it and for what project. It just seemed silly and antiquated to try to make people and messages anonymous when they are in reality totally public documents and figures. If one wants to truly keep those elements anonymous, it is possible but it requires abstaining entirely from using mailing lists quotes verbatim, and using hefty paraphrasing. But for the ethnographer, who tends to make ample use of direct quotes, mailing lists represent such a pristine and succulent source of data, it would be almost sacrilegious to paraphrase instead of quote directly.

Internet Relay Chat is a bit tricker due to its semi-public nature. On the one hand, anyone can join a channel but on the other hand, most channels are not publicly logged. So I treated the source as private and changed the names of folks unless people published sections of conversation on a quote file (common for jokes).

I found probably some of the most interesting conversations and events on IRC because of its synchronous, realtime nature that was at once playful yet very intense. On IRC, the tongue seems a little looser, people often say what first comes to mind because there is no palpable reaction except text, which does not always sting as sharply as a facial gesture combied with a sharp reaction. This looseness makes for some interensting, raw conversation that was often entertaining and otherwise essential to my research. IRC was as important to my research as mailing lists and was perhaps the most important vehicle for making my presence in a routine sense, known. Over years and years of being on IRC, chatting in the wee hours of the morning, I became a more or less semi-permanent fixture. More than anywhere else, I became embedded the routine social life of the project via IRC, a place I have yet to leave and I doubt I will anytime soon.

He also raises the question of history and I have always given a lot of attention to how historical can and should we be. In my thinking, so much work on virtual communities strikes as a-historical, describing social organization without adddressing the local and perhaps more global event that were at the basis for organizing, change etc. History, even if is something we tend to think of as neatly in the past, I guess is always ongoing, in the sense that the history is always (in the) present, always in the making, even if it is only with time that we can actually see what what going on with more clarity.

I look forward to Joseph’s ongoing research on Wikipedia and I imagine the comparisons with F/OSS (which he is already mapping), will bring into stark relief that which is unique to F/OSS and what it may share with other collaborative, non-software communities.

Ozma over at Savage Minds is looking for suggestions for a fantastic looking course on alternative economies:

“Anthropology of Alternative Economies”: a course considering the theory and ethnography of marginal, secret, and even magical economies in the contemporary world.
While in recent decades we have heard much about the emergence of a “new” global economy, many members of the world population have access to neither this “new” nor to the “old” (wage-labor) economy. Instead, they enter informal, paraformal, and/or illicit economies: providing goods and services outside of (and often in spite of) legitimate frameworks. These workers realize that the economic systems in which they live operate according to strange logics, and they sometimes develop surprising cultural theories to explain them. Such processes are generating exciting new theorization in economics and anthropology. They also present special ethical and methodological challenges to researchers. The course will cover theoretical and empirical readings, from globally diverse contexts and interdisciplinary perspectives, on these multiple sets of issues.

Today I got this email:

Dear Ms. Coleman,

We have received final copies of your dissertation entitled The Social Construction of Freedom in Free and Open Source Software: Hackers, Ethics, and the Liberal Tradition which you are submitting to fulfill the requirements for the Ph.D. in the area of Anthropology.

Our staff has reviewed your dissertation and the revisions you recently submitted. Your dissertation is now complete. Congratulations on completing the University-wide formatting requirements!

Phew. Even though I defended a couple months ago, this means I will graduate in less than a week. The dissertation formatting brought me great distress, to say the least. For example, earlier in the week since I had not heard from the office, and I knew that graduation was looming, my fears were playing out, as they usually do, in my dreams. This week’s winner was one in which I had razor sharp wooden spikes in my feet, about 15 in each one, that had to be pulled by a doctor with no anaesthesia. It was pleasant and I knew it was one grotesque metaphor of what it would feel like if I had not made the deadline for summer graduation because of some formatting mishap.

So, today I also wrote this email to the Debian project, giving them a little background on the nature of dissertations and pointing them to my chapter on ethical enculturation on Debian.

Even if you tried, it is difficult to spend much time alone at a hacker conference/festival (or any such similar event). The whole point is to immerse yourself fully in the string of events and happenings, and more so, with others—friends who you finally see after much too long time apart and with those friends who have just recently entered you life.

So when you finally leave, as I just have, things feel strangely silent, even on a train brimming with conversation.

My trip began with a flight to Amsterdam and an immediate train ride to Eindohoven where I met up with two of my steadfast IRC buddies, one of them who now lives in the South of .nl, the other who has been traveling through Europe for over a month.

After an urgently-needed night of sleep and a trip to the market and store (where I made the very wise choice of buying a waterproof rain jacket given the torrential rain that became part of the environmental woodwork ), we ignored the dark clouds, and made our way via train to Boxtel, the town adjacent to the festival grounds where the volunteer-run What the Hack crew had built, over the course of week, an infrastructure of tents, programs, radio station, party areas, bathrooms, hot showers, av equipment, and naturally, a sturdy and fast net connection, so that on top of this basic infrastructure, human presence could bring the campground to life. Already palpable was the excited buzz among the 200 + folks there with pitched tents, enjoying the beer, and relative calm that was soon to end. The CCC folks had erected a dispersed but fantastic altar of lights, the glow and twinkle of the blue, red, and white, a condensed display of the energy building up.

I was quite relieved that Mako had been guaranteed a speakers tent, which was less tent and more semi-permanent bungalow with wooden floor, beds, table, chairs, and thick white canvas forming a protective layer against the storms that came to visit, quite dramatically and perhaps too frequently, over the course of the event. I had lugged a tent with me only to discover missing poles, which in the end was a blessing. I would have been soaked staying if I had relied on it.

The first night there time started to accelerate. Arriving at 4 pm, the next thing I knew, it was 4 am and I was finally getting to bed, physically cold but emotionally glowing.

After one day of relative dryness, Wed morning greeted the day with a slow steady rain that was an ideal excuse to stay in bed, late, and get some needed sleep after a long night. As every hour passed, the trickle of folks arriving increased and soon there was a torrent of bodies. Tents accompanied by a healthy dose of electronics equipment were erected in what seemed to be like no time. There were some elaborate structures like semi-transparent buckie balls, rainbow tents, rugged army tent-barracks, right along the standard 2-4 person tents.

I spent most of Wed doing the final preparations for my talk. I had decided, a bit last minute, to enlarge the scope of my talk to include a summary of a report that included one of my contributions. I guess I have been so used to the paltry 20 minute academic conference talk that when I realized that I had 50 minutes, I knew that I could cover a few more topics. I spent most of the day re-reading the report, taking some notes, and finally making my aesthetically boring slides that consist of black text on a white background. I spent a good 5 hours in the cafeteria area, mostly by myself except when a few friends came to visit, a small volunteer effort putting WTF stickers on condoms, and finally taking a break when my good friend Niels finally showed up. With slides under my belt, and at 2:30 am, it was ostensibly tent time. The problem is that when there are more than 2 people sleeping in very close proximity to each other, there is a very good chance that getting to sleep will not be priority number one. And indeed, the main topic of conversation that night, happened to be a little odd, though it generated over 2 hours of intense, perhaps too descriptive, conversation: the merits and visceral consequences of various toilet designs (I will leave it at that).

Thursday, the first official day of the WTH, opened with a morning keynote with Hack-Tics/HFH Rop and 2600′s Goldstein, who used the hour to reflect on cons-past as well as the current political state of US/EU.

Soon after, or really right after their talk was mine. There were a handful more folks than expected (being the first talk after an hour long keynote and during lunch time) and of course my computer did not work with the A/V equipment (thankfully Mako was around to lend me his computer). I started off feeling more nervous than I should because I usually settle into my comfort zone. If you are interested in the topic, instead of seeing me talk, I recommend the report…

The best thing about WTH talks is that all they are taped within within 1.5 days are put online. There was an amazing media, audio group, Rehash who were taping the event and being really smart about how to proceed one’s the tapes arrived at their headquarters: encode immediately and put online…. (TBC)

I am pretty exhausted. Immediately following my return from .nl, I managed to stay up through the “lag” and the next day starting at 7 a.m., I continued with my month long formatting sprint and today I delivered the goods. I had some nightmarish moments. For example, yesterday I discovered that nearly every last footnote subscript was formatted with some quacked-out “www-221111” format, making them too small. When I discovered this, my heart stopped but, I along with some help, converted them to some normal style and all is good again.

Today, when I printed my dissertation on the uber-expensive, U of C watermarked, paper, the ink dared to flaked off. And I was printing it on the best of our departments’ printers. We switched printers and alas, the printing resumed as normal. I am so relieved this is almost over. I say almost because I will hear back in one week if they accept or if I need to tweak something (or turn in a whole other copy, which at 2 volumes and 2 copies, won’t be pleasant).

Yesterday I spent a good chunk of my day writing the acknowledgments. I am actually quite fond of these “outpouring of thanks” and am known to read them before anything else with every single book I have. I just love to see the different ways in which people pay their gratitude and respect to others. It is also the only section we academics can openly admit to our deep boundedness to others in the production of knowledge. I am afraid I did not thank everyone I wanted to and some of my descriptions are actually a little terse. There is a lot more I could have said but it will have to wait for another time or in person. And really thanks to everyone who helped me get through this.

You can read the first 30 pages of the dissertation which includes title, copyright notice, table of contents, figures, acknowledgments, abstract, and prologue. Soon I will have a sample chapter up and for those who want the whole document, email me. I will post the whole thing soon but actually want to change the formatting. For example, I could not, for the life of me, get quoted source code to fit within the margins with courier font 10, which was the smallest size they would accet. But I will change the margins for the online version and have courier for all the technical material.

I learned some interesting information through this whole formatting ordeal. For example, you can embargo dissertation at UMI for up to two years. Perhaps this is because you think that your dissertation is part of the axis of evil, or just too sucky for public view, or perhaps you don’t want others to take your ideas?? I am not sure but I have placed no embargo although I may not include one section of my dissertation online when I post it. It is just too ranty and feels a bit like a conversation with self.

But for now, all I can do is melt on the couch, relieved this last sprint is ovah!

I am back from PR which was somewhat relaxing, somewhat not. I will return June 23rd for a longer trip but I wanted to get some of my life here back in order. Also a couple of friends are defending on Monday and wanted to see the show. One of them is Rex and he has posted his abstract. Reminds me I should do the same but perhaps after I move to Word Press this weekend (I hope).
Good luck Rex!