I got home from the 5th HOPEin NYC which is one of the more political and what I like to think of as “attention deficit” hacker cons in the circuit. Attention deficit only because there is no central area for hacking in the gynormous Pennsylvania Hotel where it is held every 2 years in mid-town NYC hell. And then of course there is the inherent distracting nature of NYC streets. Gazillion people, things, and store to distract a wandering mind.

The con was great though. I saw a bunch of friends (great to see you all), heard that in fact, my chicken on a bottle image was a provocative and necessary addition to the aesthetics of my blog (and hence it is back along with the cute sato so the wholesome and not wholesome sit one on top of each other), and the best of all was seeing Kevin Mitnick and the Woz speak. I especially enjoyed Kevin Mitnick. He was a very personable speaker who gave us mad insight into his hilarious personality, deep social engineering skillz, and his distrurbing years of government/FBI reaming. It was good old fashion entertainment and kinda cool to see what is a hacker of such iconic status speak to 3000 + of his kind. I highly recommend listening to the audio.

Now that I am back in Chi-town I am struggling with form. Yes form. Lately I have been thinking lots about the relationship between form and content in relation to how we imagine a politics, or possibility for future change. I am arguing against a whole slew of writers (that is, as hacim pointed out “the dizzzz” in dissertation) who represent dominant conditions as *so dominant and overpowering* that there is no hope (ahem, exuse the bad pun) for politics, and yet these dudes (mostly dudes but some dudettes) tag themselves as critical scholars of capitalism. So really thier critique is a totally masturbatory exercise which is what so much of academics are about so why am I even bothering to dizzz… Anyway, the problem is that I can critique them fine (I have no problems dizzing when need be) but I am having an inordinate amount of trouble writing the second half of my chapter, not because of content, but FORM. I am not sure how I want to say everything I want to say and since I come up some complex theory of the need to deliver your form in a way that makes room for politics, so you know, I need to deliver on my frikken critique. Blargh. Dizzing is easy, constructing is harder…

I first learned of the importance of form while living aboard the R/V Heraclitus through punishment over the way I made vegetables. These two Germans crew members would get really pissed at you if you did not chop vegetables finely so of course being that 10 of us lived in the span of 80 feet, everyone who cooked, which was everyone, became like awesome, little mad-vegetable chopping machines. I mean the choice was easy: fine chopped vegetables or the wrath of the captain and expedition chief. Now my drive to chop vegetables finely was not mere coercion. I fully came to fully agree with those picky Germans (I think some academics that I dizzz might called this self-imposed agreement hegemony or governmentality). But really it is not so complex of a phenomena as finely chopped veggies, kick butt over coarsely chopped ones. I mean, it can mean a world of difference to my taste buds so of course I gave in…

So today in my great form frustration, I turned to the vegetable, making what is probably one of my favorite dishes outside of the double-fried plantain, coleslaw (pictured above). Yep, plain old coleslaw. I don’t make it all that often because the labor is too intense for a feeble academic like myself. It is so labor intensive because I have to shred it to pieces to make the cabbage transform from this somewhat gross lifeless vegetable into a succulent biella-delight. To make it this tastly, I also combine red and green cabbage, shred carrots, and garnish with finely, chopped mint. I then dress wtih ginger, lime, salt, and olive oil, and vaulla, what a fine, fine meal.

I wish my dissertation form problem was as easy as shredding or that I could “shred” through the second half of my dissertation but I think I will have to suffer a much slower and painful process to arrive at a form that delivers on the taste of my argument.

Wow, this week, my anthropology friends have just saved my butt or made my life so much infinitely richer, I must take a moment to thank them.

So, Joe of the Hankins family was kind enough to feed and satisfy a really strange obsession of mine, pens. I have this need to write with only pens I love and it was only recently that I found my true love, the uni-ball SIGNO, the nob being .5 thick. Of course this pen is impossible to find in America despite this supposed age of high globalization with the extreme fluid flows of people, financial instruments, goods. Well yeah, everything moves except for my favorite pen which comes in .7 nib but that is not my prefered size. So Joe, dear soul that he is, sent me a bunch from Japan-land as well as a packet of scary looking pickled pears. I am afraid if I eat then, I will die and never be able to use my sweet pens. So I will use the pens and keep the pears sealed in their well-sealed plastic, but thanks Joe!

Then there is my dissertation writing group, the I3. We met for the first time yesterday and I can’t believe how much of a life saver this little enterprise of ours i going to be. Their ideas and suggestions rocked. I mean Really Rocked and will mean improvements in leaps and bounds for my dissertation. Thanks you 2.

And then there is Yari, out in Gaudelope doing “fieldwork” (really at some level impossible on such a beautiful island)… Yari, a Puerto Rican anthropologist is also a TH, a True Hacker, and I don’t mean she hacks on perl (although she is always equipped with the latest and finest gadetry). I mean she is the master of social engineering always getting what she wants no matter how great or high the obstacle. For example most students at U of C don’t get office until they are POST-Field (as well as needing to accomplish like, some amazing feat). She on the other hand landed a prime office on campus as a pre-field student (and handed the torch on to me when she left). In Guadelope where she is studying union politics, she managed to move in the house of the main union boss, which is a huge ethnographhic score and just seems like a sweet pad… 1/2 of being a good ethnographer is being an adept social engineer, and since she is the master social engineer, I am sure she will rock her way through research.

Speaking of rock, since that seems to be the theme of my entry today, I want to thank Yari for she finally took my suggestion and saw some Jack Black and she, being a kindred soul, LOVED IT. Of course! So being that she is a full blooded Puerto Rican and I have some weird connection to la isla del borinquen, I went ahead and started the FIRST, Puerto Rican Jack Black Fan Club (PRJBFC). But as a matter of karma, I wanted to make sure we got Jacks approval so I wrote him a little letter explaining our club, gave him the coordinates of PR, a short history of our neocolonial status, a summary of our fine contribution to world culture (rum, dance, awesome parades), debriefed him on the Vieques affair, invited him to stay with our mommies whenever he so pleased, and explained our intention of pure goodness for the first Puerto Rican Jack Black Fan Club. Yari, my note rocked so much, he was thrilled. And as proof, to send to the world, he sent me a
photo of approval. Sweet, Puerto Rican’s Rock his WORLD! We got the green light, let’s go for the gold, my only requirment is that I am la presidente for at least the first year…

When I am unproductive academically, I am usually productive blogically and Internetally. I generally catch up with blogs and write personal emails and pour through some online reading material. Tonight, I was reading unreasonables and was reminded of David Graeber a graduate of my department who I saw talk this fall at the Anthropology meetings in Chicago. He was lively, interesting and I wanted to read more and as usual, I forgot.

Today I found him again online and I was shocked to discover he was a politically active Anarchist.
Chicago Anthropology is productive of a surplus of high minded intellectuals, not many radicals. Good to see that they can leave here intact and get jobs. Yet of course he has commented, with wit, on the Chicago style of things here:

All this struck home to me because it brought home to me just how much
ordinary intellectual practice–the kind of thing I was trained to do at
the University of Chicago, for example–really does resemble sectarian
modes of debate. One of the things which had most disturbed me about my
training there was precisely the way we were encouraged to read other
theorists’ arguments: that if there were two ways to read a sentence,
one of which assumed the author had at least a smidgen of common sense
and the other that he was a complete idiot, the tendency was always to
chose the latter

I liked his AAA talk which was about (not) consumption. He made a classic anthropological move calling us academics in general as being ethnocentric in our assessment of consumption. He basically argued that we tend to treat everthing that is an act of using and ingestion (he used many digestive metaphors during his talk) as consumption based out of a capitalist base of sorts and even when critical scholars treated it as something different, it is alwas a deviance or resistance to as opposed to something perhaps with a different history, ontology, direction. Not capitalist consumption. In his unusual though endearing talking style, he challenged us to think beyond consumption reminding us that it does not have to be our de facto measuring stick…

His writings are blunt but multi-dimensional and unlike much academic writing you feel like you learn something. I like facts of some sort and some graspable opinion to churn through your head.
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Yesterday I presented a paperThe Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast in a panel that Chris Kelty and I organized at the American Anthropological Association Meetings

There were many questions about the nature of politics in America that we raised in the discussion which were really interesting. One question which I have been trying to wrap my head around is how to treat the relationship between culture and politics in America right now. Anthropologists used to treat culture as something seperate from the political and then around 30 years ago there was a critique from within the field that said, “woah, we need to pay attention to the political in the cultural.” The conclusion from this critique and rightly so was that politics is always there in the cultural. This though is a conceptual argument and not historial one, and it is changing historical conditions which interest me.

But can it be that given historical conditions, that culture becomes some sort of “front” for politics (not in a bad way). That given the fact that politics is not really seen as a viable method for change, that it becomes hidden (not in an ideological sense) within or really emedded within culture so that now the relationship between culture and politics is different in certain cases for historical reasons?

I wrote my paper taking seriously the claims of many free and open source developers that FOSS is not about politics. I linked this to a free speech sensibility that is made particular through the pragmatics of programming, and the social context of Internet use. I wanted to link their political agnosticsm with a greater pollution of politics in American society more generally which I did not do (because I don’t know how to yet and there was no time) but I raise it in a footnote as a concern:

Of course there are specific histories and labor involved in these movements (FOSS does not move by magic and I can only nod to them here) but the fact that FOSS is coded as politically neutral allows for a greater type of movement and resignifications within the American political sphere, a sphere that itself allows and disallows for certain types of movements. Thus just as relevant is how this process reveals what is not and what is possible within the American political landscape.

But I did not have much of a handle of what I meant by the American political landscape. While not trying to make a broad claim about American politics, one thing that is noticeable is a sort of unwillingness to engage explicitly with things political or that “politics” just seems like a dirty activity that people don’t care to engage. Why the pollution of politics? and now how has culture as a vehicle for politics changed the way that politics are enacted?

A question that Chris Kelty raised at the end of his paper helped to clarify how I might think of the political right now. While I focused on the sort of political neutrallity of FOSS, he looked at the political distancing of the Creative Commons who choose to use a language of culture over politics.

He asks:

The creation of a “commons”–whether in intellectual property or any other material—necessarily implies the need to make rules about its use; and in complex societies, no one makes rules de novo. Instead they operate within other larger frameworks, and try to create small pockets of technically and legally defensible activities. So I end on this question: if process of designing commons—such as writing software and copyright licenses—is as essential a part of peoples’ lives today as I suggest it is becoming—should we call it “culture”?

So this made me think that though politics and culture are always co-constituted in some sort of way, this relationship is at historical level changing. FOSS and Creative Commons are just 2 examples of how culture is being deployed as a vehcile for politics worldwide (see Sahlins 1999 for a great article about this.)

But the question becomes I think how and why can’t the political be recognized or be made explict. Is this for strategic reasons, cultural, of just because politics works in some sort of weird Saussurian way in which now you tend not to designate X as being political, but the meaning of the political only gets constitued through a field of difference. That is the sign of politics gets signified by virtue of its difference from other signs. Or is culture as a trope a more powerful vehicle for making political claims?? A combination of all the above?

I think I need to re-read Sahlins.

Shalins, Marshall “Sentimental Pessimism” and Ethnographic Experience: Or, Why Culture Is Not a Disappearing “Object” in Daston, Lorraine, editor Biographies of Scientific Objects

The desperation of lack of chairs and lights finally drove us to the mega super storie of low cost wooden furniture, plastic knick-knacks, and Swedish meatballs, Ikea located in the far north suburbs of Chicago. It was a trek from Hyde Park and whenever I find myself in the land of blue and yellow, I feel like I in fact have traveled to a far away land, yet it is still that of America just one in which certain dynamics become more apparent than in the normal humdrum of life.

Young couples shacking up for the first time are ubiqutous at Ikea, picking out furniture with this “great anticipation” and glee in their eyes reflecting the innder psychology of the commodity–that this cool new couch and dresser will make their domestic lives that much easier and… better in the near near future.
Of course they find out, like most of us do, that in fact the shiny new x does nothing to save some loveless relationship from a path of spiriling loathing and destruction (I did not share this with them as I did not want to ruin the few moments of safe comfort they did have)…

But it is that dynamic of hoping that those little and big things (a knife, a new toaster, a chair, some great pots and plants, the perfect pen) will bring about some greater ease and comfort in your life. At least I think that is the very hope and justification built in the act of buying, especially since if that one thing does not work, there is, just around the corner, gobs of more stuff that can be bought to *hopefully* fulfill that function of greater ease, comfort, and happiness.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am caught up in this process as much as I really can’t stop thinking and theorizing about it. Today I bought what I hoped will be a desk chair that will provide extra comfort to me, which I am sure it will given that my last chair, in a word blew to the nth degree. But what is amazing is how that initial idea of “greater happiness” creeps out from a relatively conservative thought (like this is more comfortable) into encompassing other wishes and desires like perhaps that chair will make *the difference* between writing a shitty dissertation and writing a most excellent one. I mean, I may be deluded (that is no one except me might fall into this trap) but I think it is hard not to be seduced into the very pyschology of the commodity in which it promises to do something better for you. And though it might (there is nothing like a sharp knife for cutting veggies compared to a dull knife), it seems to extend off in areas that it should never go. And since there is just such a sick abundance of stuff in the west, especially America where it is simply easier to get a new toaster than to fix one, people are caught up into this psychology in a daily way.

But that is why I think going to Ikea can be so paradoxical. It makes apparent this dynamic, this psychology even as everyone is behaving under its powerful influence in this one huge blue and yellow building located in some thankless suburb. It is the fact that we can see everyone under the spell that its very dynamic becomes almost palatable. In other words, Ikea ain’ just a place to get some furniture and deformed Swedish meatballs but it is an exursion into the very heart and soul of the promisory phsychology of consumerism, a promisory that seems to have no limits in the eyes, minds, and bellies of American consumers

The relationship between class and culture is a perplexing one. Ever since our already questionable car almost blew up while driving last week, we have been using public transportation everywhere here in Puerto Rico. Given that this is a car-loving island where public transportation exists but is definitely not “easy,” those with cars and those without cars mark the haves from have-nots (though there are plenty of working class and poor people with cars too). But really if you are using public transportation on the island, you probably don’t have all that much money. Most people here who have cars have probably never or rarely taken a bus or one of the city to city vehicles, a publico. Traveling on them and hearing the conversation gives you a sense of what people of different classes struggle and deal with. News about social security, the island-wide health plan, medicaid and all are ample on the busses. Running errands, shopping, and just general getting around takes quite a long time. You see lots of elderly people and mothers with kids. Life is easier with public transportation but it is still hard.
Riding the busses which is so class based here as it is in many places in the states, made me think about what it is that let’s say an upper middle class Puerto Rican shares with a lower/working class Puerto Rican. On the one hand so much about the music, certain values, and food are similar yet life experience given the differences that money affords in the realm of security, commodities, transportation, housing, and education seems so vast that cultural similarities pale in comparison to class difference.

But along a similar axis, do folks from a certain class (let’s say working class) from one cultural region share more with the upper class of their own region or with the same class of an entirely different region? It is hard to answer. Marxists of course would love it if class was more important than culture, but culture plays such a strong role in class experience (foods, music, values, religion) that there seems to be a lacuna of shared experiences of a class across culture.

So within the same society, class divides yet across societies it seems more like culture divides. Although it is certainly relative. Places where class divide is not as strong, perhaps cultural affinity is stronger whereas moments of great class divide are moments of trans-cultural and national unity.

These questions are not easily answered but it is remarkable how stepping onto a bus alone is stepping into another socio-cultural realm.

If you have ever wondered what it is like to do research with and on Debian developers, here is a short movie that captures, with swift detail, the joy, the wonder, that is fieldwork on and with Debian hackers.

Shot in the offices of the EFF during my goodbye party, I was speaking to a friend about ethicalization on Debian. To my right, is one Debian developer (you can immediately idenitify him via his swirly shirt which he wears with total pride) and a prospective Debian developer, who we can call “Barney” to keep his identity private.

Just as I am talking about the minutiae of embodied practices that promote ethical adoption on Debian, the two fellows on my right are doing what I shall call “the ethical dance”, the Debian developer carefully leading the prospective developer into the new dance moves that will refine his ethical skills to match those of his hacking skills. I mimic the punches as I explain to my friend the intricacies of the dance, that only take on ever more enigmatic dimensions when done online, in the so called dismebodied realm. The depth of the dance only takes on new added deepness to make up for the shallowness of bodies…

The movie ends panning out to a very tan and jolly Karl Marx (yes of Kapital fame), who nods in deep satisfaction with the realization that ethical doing (materialism) and not just ethical thinking (idealism)
is in full swing right before his eyes.

Enjoy, it has taken me a long time to figure this ritual out….

My department as do many, have grad students go through this curious yet extensively effective (and somewhat tortuous) ritual of compiling a HUGE bibliography of works (about 100 pieces) for your qualifying exams. They tell you that compiling the list and reading it is way more important than the test itself, and damn those advisers of mine were SO on the money. You have about three categories (Theory with a capital T, mid-level theory, and then ethnographies or works in your particular subject matter). So, the reading process is magical and I mean magical in that sense that special things happen and it is not because you get to spend all this time reading but because all these unexpected connections congeal and form as you slog your way through all these seemingly different works. When you read some postcolonial reading of western science in India such as Another Reason by Prakash, alongside Bakhtin, Weber, Sombart, and Sherry Turkle, you get, some Weird Science. You are inspired in these strange ways to make connections that well, otherwise, would be impossible to forge in independence of each other.

I have not been in such a luxurious reading phase of my academic career but more in the nitty gritty phase of collecting data and mining for information that I am supposed to take back to the hordes of books that sit behind me and in storage, books that almost feel like forgotten relics to me now. One keeps reading while doing fieldwork but not with the same fervent intensity as when one is taking classes or reading for exams or residing at the University of Chicago, where everyone reads more than you do, believe me, it is sick there.

Anyway, just recently I had a Weird Science Reading Experience as I intersected 4 different books and pieces: The Transparent Society by David Brin, The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, Hacker Culture by Douglass Thomas, and Why nerds are unpopular.

I can’t really get into the vast particles of intersecting themes between these works but one has really taken my fancy because and through these works is the relationship between privacy (or a private self) and accountability (or the public self). I had finished reading Brin who makes a pragmatist argument that privacy can only be secured through freedom and especially openness and accountability in a democratic society. For him, openness, free information flows, and accountability are the chief means to keep a society healthy, that is free and democratic and only when we have such a free, open society can we thus have the luxury of demanding and ensuring privacy. A lack of openness = no privacy for Brin. As he notes:

While free speech seems an indivisible, immiscible right that must be preserved with absolute clarity for liberty’s sake, privacy appears to be more like a liquid, a delicacy that free people can pour for themselves, as much or as little as they choose. Privacy is a wonderful, highly desirable
benefit of freedom…. On the other hand, there can be few compromises when
it comes to protecting the underpinnings of liberty. Those foundations will
crumble unless they are guarded with fervent vigilance. Without both
individual freedom and distributed sovereignty, all of our modern vaunted modern privacy would vanish into legend…

(more…)

Do anthropologists harm the communities they study?

This is a large, loaded, smoking-gun, hot-pistol sort of question that requires a verbose answer that I can’t write up right now but there are these moments when you feel good about being an anthropologist, knowing that you did influence things in a positive sort of way. This happened recently when a Debian developer asked if he could post his answers to my email interview questions on his website. I have to keep all my research material confidential (here is the consent form that interviewees have to sign unless they want to go ahead and make it public. And I guess this fellow developer liked his answers and thus posted them here.

When he asked me whether he could post them, I asked him why he wanted to do this, to which he replied:

Since I sent in those answers, I have continued to inform myself with
regard to these issues. However, I am definitely grateful for having sat
down and sorted out all of thoughts about intellectual property, patent
law, free software, Debian and how each of these things relate to the
others. Now when I read something new, I have a sort of “base” of
coherent ideas from which I am working.

Can’t complain too much about the process of injecting some reflection and reflexivity… So don’t run away right away when an anthropologist comes knocking at your door although more on the perils of anthropology later!

This has to have been on of the most geeky (and diversely so) weeks of my research. It started off with the Creative Commons license kick off party, morphed into the EFF holiday party where we watched the new Lord of the Rings movie, led into finishing my interview with John Gillmore. And then on Friday night when I thought I had a break, my IRC conversations with friends turned into this trip down memory lane about the love, the life, the “holistic world” that was the BBS scene, bled the next day into a fascinating interview with Danny of NTK, Quinn and Gilbert, then it was off to celebrate the Elcomsoft acquittal organized by Don Marti and majestically ended today with a tour de force of ytalk.

Nearing the end of the interview, Danny mentioned that he thinks a lot about the necessary conditions for the existence of culture. (he really would be one kick-butt anthropologist imho thinking in these terms). This led to a smattering of opinions in which he noted that the cultural of geekdom has been more solidly constituted over the last 5 years through the continual building of a rich history and especially a much wider consciousness and use of this history, while Quinn considered the maturity of the community (being that there is now a critical mass of geeks over thirty) as an important facet, while I chimed in that perhaps the growing connections between different nodes or facets of hacking (like the kinda hardware hackers, free software folks, tech-activists, cypherpunks forged through the net and conferences) also plays a role. So all our comments point to this interesting sort of “thickening” in which there is this strong sense of past, in which a deepening of the present occurs through the interconnections of different communities of geeks, while geeks individually mature into the future, temporal processes which help to get us closer to the “cultural” in hacking.

The Elcomsoft party though small, was a visual and practical embodiment of those very things we had just been talking about during the interview. The celebratory commemoration of legal events important to the hacker community literally make the history of which Danny spoke of earlier. And this party was one among others (like to celebrate the freeing of Dmitry), that brought together people from slightly different nodes of hacking and of different generations and ages whether it be the young high school duo of debian developers, Misha and Aaron; the free software advocates and users like Rick Moen; and the contingent of cypherpunks along with a smattering of other hackers and activists at the party.

I feel sorry for people who don’t like fieldwork becaue well, mine tends to be pretty fun. What I love about these geek gatherings is that I meet the most interesting folks , like Howard Besser who was wearing a very rad tee-shirt, one among the many which can be seen in his most amazing database of shirts, shirts that he loves like children!

He brought the question of geek culture to the floor when he asked me what I thought about Cyberselfish by Paulina Borsook, which happens to be my least favorite books on hackers, ever. We both hold a pretty unfavorable take on the book as it over generalizes about the “culture” of geeks taking one element, that of techno-libetarianism, and making that to be a coherent blanket of culture, that kind just came from no where to cover the entire culture of geeks in the Bay Area and beyond. She also presents a very timeless, rough notion of culture that is so very annoying especially since it is popular texts like these that propagate a certain notion of culture, one that makes me internally cringe. In her preface, she writes that despite the subjective elements of culture, it “is real, hardy, and enduring..” And then she says that “Regimes change, culture preserves.” To treat culture as this “thing” that rests above history and that is not formed is terribly naive and never lets you get into the interesting questions which have to do with the formation of and processes around cultural creation and expression.

So, the conversation was a great way to end my “geek week” because it reminded me that instead of positing the total existence of this “hardness” and “oneness” of culture as Borsook does, Danny’s question about what even allows us to posit the existence of the cultural is a much better starting point. A good starting point for me, as this year comes to a close…