I posted this over at DGI but I think it is worth mentioning over here since I write plently on IP law.

***

Chris Ketly over at Savage Minds has written an excellent roundup of the ironies that plague academic publishing today. These ironies, however, are not all that humorous.

It is distressing to see the AAA abide by a closed publishing model, even while in public they are supposedly committed to “public anthropology.”

I think however the tide is shifting among academics. The recent resolution made by the Cornell Faculty Senate is a move in the right direction.

The Senate strongly encourages all faculty, and especially tenured faculty, to consider publishing in open access, rather than restricted access, journals or in reasonably priced journals that make their contents openly accessible shortly after publication.3

The Senate strongly urges all faculty to negotiate with the journals in which they publish either to retain copyright rights and transfer only the right of first print and electronic publication, or to retain at a minimum the right of postprint archiving.4

A new anthro blog has arrived Savage Minds. Initiated by Rex and Kerim it boasts a number of other young, cyber-blog-savvy anthropolgists. I like the content, a lot. I can’t say I like the look, at all. Perhaps they were unconsciously thinking of themselves as “budding” anthro-pods and hence the Martha Stewart-like flowers. But despite the aesthetics, the conversation is vibrant, do check it out.

Just when I was catching up with the ol’ email and errands, a cold came my way so I am parked at the couch doing the minimal amount of work I need to do so that I recover, I hope, before the defense on the 25th. But I wanted to let folks know that DGI is now running on word press and may require a resubscribe if you read on a feeder (it did for me).

The most recent entry is on a seemingly very interesting disseration out of UPenn by Maurice Black on the Art of Code. Can’t wait to check it out.

Check out Chris Kelty’s new piece, Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics. Not only is it a very clever argument about the unique constitution of the geek public, this may be the first full length article related to FOSS to come out in an anthropology journal. CK edited a shorter set of articles in AQ on IP, geeks, FOSS, and the law but this new piece ups the ante. He has cracked up the coconut for anthro geek studies in provocative ways and I am sure more good stuff will follow.

Abstract:
This article investigates the social, technical, and legal affiliations among “geeks” (hackers, lawyers, activists, and IT entrepreneurs) on the Internet. The mode of association specific to this group is that of a “recursive public sphere” constituted by a shared imaginary of the technical and legal conditions of possibility for their own association. On the basis of fieldwork conducted in the United States, Europe, and India, I argue that geeks imagine their social existence and relations as much through technical practices (hacking, networking, and code writing) as through discursive argument (rights, identities, and relations). In addition, they consider a “right to tinker” a form of free speech that takes the form of creating, implementing, modifying, or using specific kinds of software (especially Free Software) rather than verbal discourse.

Also on my academic blog DGI, I post it here. So my advisor wanted more instance of joking and boasting in code and here are some examples with some initial reflections on what is all means (mostly taken from my dissertation).

Sherry Turkle long ago wrote about hacking as “sports death.” Below, using the example of code, I would like to show how the boasting and taunting and disdain found in comment code performs as a jousting comepetition that acts like thier informal peer review process and it the basis by which they embody the role of expert hacker. My own brash language and snarky jokes will probably not remain in the final version, but it is the only way I get through writing my dissertation…

*********
If the subject of elitism erupts on mailing lists discussion over project organization, a form of stylized boasting, taunting, cajoling, and elistist disdain is often performed and at the level of code. Let me provide two examples. The first one is written in the style of an

So so so, I am nearing the deadline… It looks like the dissertation will be around 450 pages, minus appendix and works cited. It is a little monstrous so I am glad that I am finishing even if it feels like a premature birth. Better to give birth to a smaller dissertation than a tub-oh-lard. Right?

Speaking of anthropology, Kerimreports on all the anthroblogs and has updated them on a wiki magic…

I saw this remarkable photo spread on Purselipsquarejaw and can not but help passing it along here.

These are the most striking photos I have seen about how bodies are literally made. A certain vision of self, physique, right, and wrong, culturally scuplted across time and space in the US through a dizzing range of everyday practices. This is visual ethnography at its finest, driving home how text, taken alone can be a medium of extreme poverty. While it is powerful and concise, and can be poetic and evocative, text alone is sometimes hard to capture the actual force and depth of what you are trying to capture.

Zonezero nicely theorizes the nature of digital photos and its implications for capturing a sense of reality in the making, a new type of the real.

I guess I am struggling with that right now with my dissertation, wrapping up two chapters that mean a lot to me for they touch upon many personal experiences. And by virtue of experiencing them, I know my representation is just a mere shadow of the actual events I witnessed.

Anyway, I better get back to that, shadow or not, its needs to be done, soon.:-)

Folks always ask me predictive type questions about the future of software, open source, and hackers and I usually shy away from those questions and say something like ‘Anthropology is purely interprestive/descriptive with little eye to the future’ which is more or less true (though we shed that stance in our grants). But then there are instances of reverse prediction which are quite ironic like… In my dissertation I claim that we can study free software to study liberalism’s conceptual points of tensions, its imaginative reformulations, and its heightened states of contradiction. That is while free software draws on discourses of liberal freedom it challenges some other classically liberal arguments and I used the example of Richard Epstein as a liberal who might not agree with the model of free software.

And in fact he proved me correct in an article, “Why open source is unsustainable.” But while he proved me correct, his article is otherwise filled with a number of simple factual errors. notably:

“Second, once someone incorporates open source software in his own programs, then any license that he issues cannot charge others for it…” I guess he has no idea of Red Hat and countless other firms that sell free software…

Anyway, every once in a while, it is fun to predict, even if entirely by accident.

I have been struggling with a concept and historical method I call historical irony and below is a first stab that I wrote tonight…

Historical irony is a method of positive critique that magnifies social struggles and alternatives that surface unexpectedly and as significant despite the undeniable existence of dominant ideologies and structures of powers. Thus historical irony accentuates a central feature of the human condition, namely unpredictability (Markell 2003) which I think can be productively thought of as vital force that deflates, even if only minimally, one of the crucial features of actually existing systems of concentrated power: the desire for perfect control. In other words, at a highly conceptual level, power seeks to eliminate the ironic in human affairs, rendering a world where nothing contrary to what is expected by those in power ever happens. To state more mundanely, it is world where every large-scale bureaucracy (from the IRS to the DMV to the U of Chicago registrar) can screw you for a late bill and where the president of Time Warner can convinces us that intellectual property is God’s gift to all earthlings. Aside from being a boring (and potentially very tragic) world, life without irony is a world without politics. Thus as method that wants to affirm politics, historical irony seeks to magnify

I recently finished a brilliant book, Bound by Recognition by Patchen Markell. Lucid yet intricate, Patchen grapples with basic facts of the human condition and applies it to political theory and uses it to launch a critique againt orthodox currents in the debate about multiculturalism. Here I cannot provide a rich or even simple account of the book. But for the purpose of this entry, it is worth noting my favorite part in his analysis is about the fact of unpredictability which can be explained by two words he uses a lot, action and bound. Over and over again he argues persuasively that our actions always exceeds our intentions, this surplus is what interconnects us to other people (and other actions) in ways we could have never imagined. This in fact is what nullifies any idea of the self-enclosed, atomized individual, a zip-locked freezer safe entity of self hood. Eastern philosophy and religion has made debunking sovereign
notions of the self central to itself, while much of Western thought has traveled in the other direction, arguing for or at least an aspiring to various forms of sovereignty (the self, the social group, the nation). Using some gripping stories and accounts from classical Western literature and philosophy, he is able to skillfully deconstruct the illusions of sovereinty, and also argue the ways in which forms of injustice are often predicated on these ideas of sovereignty. Anyway, if you are into political philosophy, Hegel, Greek tragedy, multiculturalism or a good read, check it out.

So, I especially like books that seem to confirm the mundane experiences of your life. As I explained a couple of days a go, a piece of mine that was originally published in an arcane anthropology journal, made its way (and I have no idea how) to some equally enigmatic (at least to me) Linux jounral and then made it to GrokLaw. Though I fully intended that that article be confined to an academic audience (having already published other similar pieces that were less anthro-jargony), my intentions criss-crossed with someone elses and new results were born. This is what Patchen shows the unpredicable nature of our actions, makes life at once exciting, risky, joyful, and full of sorrow.

Though receiving accolades from PJ at GrokLaw and others who have written me, I also received the attention (by which I mean I received emails) from two of the more well known figures in Free and Open Source Software, easily identified by their three letter initials ESR and RMS. Both to say the least were unhappy with my description of FOSS as politically agnostic. I think part of difference of opinion can be explained by some confusion over language and terms (and arent most misunderstandings over this), but otherwise I think we just have pretty different interpretations (or perhaps more apt, different ideas over where one should interpret social life)

In the past most anthropologists never had to deal with the question of