aesthetics and everything bibliography

Tonight, I am reading “The-Man-of-Words in the West Indies” by Roger Abrahams not as a tool of procrastination but in fact for my research on hackers. Yes, it even surprises but delights me as when I left the realm of Caribbean studies to pursue the study of technology and hackers, I thought that I really closed the door on the Caribbean. And I was bummed because the study of the Caribbean though marginalized is one heck of a lot of fun.

I certainly did not think that I would use Caribbean literature to understand my subject matter. But alas, I am. There are many parallels and contrasts to think with that actually are much better conceptual fodder than most of the cyber-material I have so far read. It either means I have yet to read the right stuff, I am totally off mark, or the cyber-material is still in tadpole stage, a little worm-like creature trying to make it out of the water so that it can strut around with some substance. I bet it is a little of each…

The book is great so far but it is approcahing one and I was informed during my Chi Gong class tonight that working, especially reading, beyond 11 totally screws with your gall bladder and liver meridians. And it all clicked: I now know why us grad students are an angry, depressed lot. We never give a chance for our GB and Liver meridians to get restored. It is not drinking at the pub that has caused so much damage but years and years of late night reading!

Oh well, for now I will have to rely on acupuncture and Chi Gong for restoration as I can’t see any way out of this late night reading. Maybe writing ng does not count as long as you don’t read while you write

Today I spent the afternoon watching the Debian Developer Project Leader debate on IRC for the elections. I have been anticipating the debate for a long time as such sort of events are pretty pertinent to my research and I was also interested in how a debate would play out on a medium like IRC. I was the back-up moderator just in case the moderator had any problem with his net connection. Thankfully that did not happen but when he asked, it reminded me of one of my recent nightmares that entailed having to ask all the questions for the debate while on IRC. In the dream, something akin to ethnographic stage fright took over as I locked up, unable to ask not even one single interesting question despite the fact that I, as the anthropologist, was supposed to know a lot about Debian. Thankfully, none of it played out and I was able to sit back and enjoy the debate and discussion albeit, a little groggy from some deep sleep after nearly 3 continuous nights of insomnia.

I was asked what I thought of the debate by one of the candidates and though I am going to refrain from commenting on their positions, there was a lot of stuff about the debate that I found pretty interesting. Admittedly much of it had nothing to do with the debate per se. But more about me as a supposed ethnographer of cyberspace. I think back to a year ago when I only knew like a handful of developers and rarely went onto IRC as it frightened me. But now, there are some nights that I would rather stay home and hang out on various channels and am much more comfortable in the debian-devel channel being that I now know many of the developers in person or from talking to them on IRC. In some ways, being an online anthropologist is not all that different from meat-world anthropology if you take the time to really spend time in this world. Over time, you get to know more people, trying to follow and observe the mundane and extraordinary aspects of their lives. Time, trust, and conversation are all important facets of getting research done. IRC has been a really indispensable part of the process, enabling me to keep in touch more closely with the Debian community as well as developing friendships much like any other anthropologist might living in a more close knit community would. When I first logged onto the channel a long time ago, well, it intimidated for me. All these faceless, people with nicks like “BigNachos” spewing out all this text that at the time was really incomprehensible. I would log off almost as quickly as I entered. It was after meeting a bunch of the developers at the Debian conference that I gave it another go and the second time it was a lot easier and I grew to really enjoy the whole IRC thing, which has seemed to touch my life in quite a number of ways.
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I am now at that stage of my PhD research when I “wean” myself off of research and start to try to form an addiction to data organization and writing. Although I have yet to write anything formal for my dissertation, I am starting to work on some articles and paper conferences, which gets me to think about my dissertation in a more visceral and tangible way (maybe the viscerality has to do with the knots in my stomach when I think about it for too long).

Why the knots? Ok, so it is inherently a hard sort of thing to do but really I think it is plain old scary because, well, no one tells you how to write such a “document”! There is next to no guidance which in some ways in nice (no one to cramp your (life)style but on the other hand, it seems wacky wacked). It is akin to running a 5 k and then switching to a marathon with no training in between and no “thirst quencher” to aid you through the struggle.

The powers that be who accept you supposedly only accept very independent thinkers and researchers. And now I know: because, well, there is no one there to give you even the slightest hint as to how to write a book. It is kinda just suppose to happen and you hope for the best.

Writing the dissertation holds the same type of obscure mystique as the “fieldwork experience” for Anthropologists. It is a scary, mythical unknown that you are sort of thrown into, and you have to figure it out all by yourself, groping blind for the right path so that you can finally begin to do some work. But in fieldwork, one hits this time or moment, when the fear subsides, things start clicking and making sense, and one even kinda enjoys the process. For some this is a a gradual happening while for others, it happens more like a Wolfian epiphany that is invoked by some late night drunken escapade which for me is more likely to happen on a late night IRC debate when I fire off words as fast as my non-native typing fingers can type. But it is precisely through learning from others that you come to “know” what the hell is going on.

But I doubt such an epiphany will ever come with the writing of the dissertation.
Or I imagine that it will come afterward when everything is said and done. Maybe I am being a little dramatic tonight but it is for the most part a very solitary process and I am not a very solitrary girl. So I think I have come up with a solution…

Tonight while hanging out on the IRC channel #debian-devel, I grew so envious of the how people could:

a) just pop in to get some help for something they are working on
b) take a little break from work with others who totally share their space mind space

I then began to have little dreams and visions of having my very own anthropology/geek/science tech/dissertation channel that would ease the fright, the pain, really the lacuna of dark asociality that is writing a dissertation and also provide endless amusement with some in-house procrastination. I think it is a tremendous solution to what I think is a real problem but I then also have to solve the problem of how to get what really are a bunch of neo-luddities onto IRC without having them think that I “have just gone native.” Well, one can dream, right?

There are some nice geek and free softwae/open source compliations out there! Check em out and please add to them:

Echo Science and Technology
Confronting Technology
Free and Open Source Bibliography
All Things Hackish and Geekish, A Bibliography

Not bad…. Keep on adding, adding, adding, adding where you see fit!

I read mailing lists a lot for research and to tell you the truth, I am not too fond of them even though from time to time there is a gem of a thread with some insightful statements that go beyond the “OPINION ORGY” that so often characterizes mailing list chatter. I recently stumbled across such a jewel on the Debian legal list.

The intention of the original post was to urge people to use caution and deliberation when using certain words and terms when talking about copyright issues, especially related to infringement. It states:

Some people might feel that punishing the
infringement of a legal fiction more harshly than we punish violations
of universally accepted human rights reflects a priority inversion in
the legal system. Some people also feel that the very large media
corporations that now control most published, copyrighted works in
existence have ample resources to pursue tort claims against
infringer. If you share either of these perspectives, then you might
also wish to help restore sanity to modern discussions of intellectual
property law by not referring to allegedly infringing materials or
actions as “illegal”. Instead, simply call them “infringing”. Better
still, don’t even call them “infringing” unless you’re confident they
actually are — and keep in mind that even today, the standard in the
U.S. for *criminal* copyright infringement requires 1) the existence of
a valid copyright in the work being distributed; 2) infringement by the
defendant; 3) *willful* infringement by the defendant; 4) infringement
by the defendant for commercial advantage or private financial gain.
Some jurisdictions also that the government prove absence of a first sale in the allegedly infringing works. After all of that, acts
undertaken in the exercise of Fair Use provide for an affirmative
defense, meaning that you should know that there is no Fair Use
exception for the activities in question. If you don’t know all of
that, perhaps you’re better off not telling people what they’re doing
is “illegal”.

Pat Benatar wrote that “love is a battlefield” but I think she really meant that “language is a battlefield” the battlefield where such things as love and the nuances of intellectual property get fought. I like Branden’s post a lot because it fully recognizes how important the politics of language is in this whole debate, a politics that requires the transformation of everyday language usage as well as much tougher language battles in which common society-wide perceptions and definitions that are propagated through powerful and mainstream economic and social institutions must be altered too.

I love pirates but the media industry in concert with the government is making pirates of hackers and common citizens which then helps to define what the legal nature of copyright is. And this is accomplished through many means but it always has to function through the web of language. Hence the power alone of a word like copyleft is that it, among many other things, denaturalizes the term copyright, cracking it open to scrutiny and possibly opening a path for change… Branden in his post argues that copyright is not a natural right but a socially bound privilege that is quite mutable. People forget this and a collective jog of the memory is a good thing to undergo. Playing around with the even the minutiae of language helps to free certain terms and concepts from what we think they are… We have to be reminded from time to time that language is not a disembodied thing but a tool whose contours and shape should change depending on the work at hand.

The thread had many other interesting points but it ended with another powerful statement:

Perhaps we need to be thinking about alternative ways to uphold the
“protection of the moral and material interests resulting
from…scientific, literary or artistic production[s]“?

In other words, I don’t think it *necessarily* follows from Article 27
that we must have a global oligarchic hegemony of media corporations
dictating to us what we shall and shall not read, watch, perceive,
write, and share with our fellow human being.

I found this statement quite exiting. I guess in some ways, I have always thought about the current IP system as inadequate, the solution being a variation of an already existing scheme (as the copyleft does). But why not, why not, come up with a radically different incentive scheme? In some ways this seems to obvious but often some eloquent powerful statement is what is needed to inspire a new plane of thought… Ahhhh the beauty, the power of language…

This morning, I was sleeping soundly when a dog, a sato, of course, starting to bark and howl expressing what seemed to be full-blown grievous pain. I could not help but wake up to the sounds and take a peek out the window to see a dog hobbling and howling away. There was not much I could do at 6 am, his agonizing cries leaving tight knots in my tummy and unable to fall back asleep.

So I rolled out of bed, turned on my computer and went through many emails that I have neglected in the past week. The stillness of the morning combined with some mini-travels and wanderings on the net calmed by tummy and it was then when I was struck at how emotionally attached I have become to certain parts of the net in the sense that I realized how it gives me a certain type of joy, happiness, and satisfaction. It sure is a uber-nifty tool for communication as well as a means to unleash hordes of information, and facilitate commerce or creative production, but it is also this complex multilayered social medium that draws in the human self in all its own variegated complexity.

One of the things I stumbled across this morning only added to my excitement. A group from the University of Chicago is organizing a conference on digital genres, this initial manifesto offering the underlying intellectual spirit of what they hope to accomplish. Among other things, I like how it emphasizes the social thickness of digital genres:

“Digital genres are not merely art, nor are they merely spectacularly efficient ways to move information between bodies. Digital genres do more than extend the human ability to communicate across space and time. They have the potential to create a world which we can inhabit. This potential of digital genres has become more and more emergent in recent days. Massively multiplayer games are not ways for people to communicate in the world, they are worlds within which people communicate. And they are just the tip of the iceberg.

I sometimes have this eerie feeling of “leaving” a place when I take off for a couple of days away from my computer to then return to this place and the people who inhabit it. Or I have this odd moment of finding about connections between people on the net that I had no idea were connected. Friendships blossom and follow paths online that differ from meatworld ones but then they tend to converge blurring that oft noted division between the on and offline world. The division is a useful and necessary demarcation although it is less of a steadfast division and more of a process of constantly shifting boundaries whose movement is predicated on the fact that these two domains converge all the time .

Some of my strongest friendships are those that have a consistent online and offline component, as those friendships develop around a multi-dimensional bucki-ball sphere of experiences in which the mundane, the emotional, the intellectual, and the creative unfold in realtime to occupy different parts of the sphere of friendship that you form with others. The sharing of the offline and online mitigates against the fragmentation that can mark life in a modern urban setting. I think we will look back to this time on the net to see it as something that has transformed the very nature of friendships, especially as more kids start this friendship building it in tandem with online and offline components from a young age.

But there is one thing that irks me about my life online. Just as James Gleick writes about in Faster, life online speeds things up. When I leave to places like Puerto Rico or go away for the weekend with some friends, finding myself unplugged, time slows down, and significantly. I like the molasses quality of life away from the net.
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And who says Geeks are not social?

Jury Rejects DMCA. Freedom Lovers Party.

On Saturday, December 21, 2002, freedom-loving
people will have a party in San Francisco to
celebrate a total acquital in the first criminal
prosecution under the controversial Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The “not guilty” verdict in the trial of Russian
software company Elcomsoft clearly shows that
Americans do not accept attacks on legitimate fair
use in the name of copyright. Elcomsoft made no
illegal copies of anything. Their software simply
provided for converting proprietary, restricted
“e-books” to open formats.

To quote the jury foreman, Dennis Strader, “Under
the eBook formats, you have no rights at all,
and the jury had trouble with that concept.”

We The People have spoken: It’s time to bring
moderation and sanity back to copyright law.

Who: Freedom-loving people (that’s you)

What: Party to celebrate the Elcomsoft verdict

Where: Electronic Frontier Foundation
454 Shotwell Street
San Francisco CA 94110-1914 USA

When: Saturday, December 21, 2002, 8:00 PM

Why: DMCA reform isn’t just about computer
programmers any more. 12 randomly chosen
American people say the DMCA has gone too far

I asked Alex a fellow grad student at the U of C anthropology department what he thinks about how much an academic should blog of her own work. His blogged answer (I am still waiting for my more personal answer) is an insightful musing about the general form of the blog genre, examining its strengths and weaknesses as a medium of communication and writing. He notes:

They create informal networks and conversations, but are more structured not informal conversation. You can blog a conference, but all the Navy Seal shit (intellectually speaking of course)goes down at the bar, where alcohol (martinis, preferably) and camaraderie galvanize your brains and get the intellectual juices flowing. Blogs allow the initial presentation of thoughts and ideas long and structured enough to put in a book, but they are not books, nor is their formal structure of the sort in which one develops into a book without a lot of work. Blogs stand in between, like the custard before it sets: too thick to truly be appropriate to the ebb and flow of conversation, too thin to take on the hard solidity of a book.

So where does this in-betweenness give us academics that let’s say a book or essay doesn’t? His answer is that they act as a fertile productive breeding ground for what then will possibly become more fleshed out future work:

“Blogs are all topic sentences and no supporting evidence, god bless ‘em. This flare-up-and-fade-away aspect of them is what makes them so great and inspires such thought. This, in fact, is my answer to the question: How best to blog my academic career? The blog is a place to put all your unsubstantiated hunches, since it’s too compact a format to allow for substantialization anyway. A blog is a place for thoughts that are one blog long [clever indeed].

But what else has this sort of state of in-betweenness allowed or caused in a more general sense? I have thought a lot about the “the blog” as a genre and although I loathe the name, I love blogging and feel a need to explain this new found passion, which so many share. I tend to obsess over two particular aspects of the blog: 1) How has the blog shifted the terrain of epistemology? 2) How does the blog shift the boundary between public and private persona?
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Today felt like a very “anthropological day” for me. I purposively waited till I was comfortable with the interviewing process before interviewing some of the more visible and well known players in the hacker cultural and political world. So nearly after 20 months of research, and 50 in person interviews, I finally interviewed John Gillmore. After 3 hours we got through like half of the things I wanted to talk about so I will have to go back for more. It was a great interview reminding me of why I like being an anthropologist too . And I “feel” so much more like an anthropologist (that is I kinda know what I am doing) than when I started although not entirely so. Along with my project, this research is *very much* also a training period of learning how to be an anthropologist. I have and will make mistakes that will hopefully be reflective feedback tools to improve my own practice of anthropology if I do indeed continue to be an anthropologist (after today’s interview, I had this strong urge to be a biographer inspired by John Gillmore’s tales as a software developer, passionate learner, political provocateur, and all all round interesting guy). But after 10 minutes of serious, deep thought, I was like: “hell no, not 6 years into my degree and 3 years into this project.” But maybe later…

I get asked a lot what anthropology is or what the differences are between a sociologist and anthropologist. I cringe at those questions because I would like to answer with ease and total clarity but feel like I usually fail. But my interest in answering this question, well, was sparked after I received an email that claimed that morality could only studied from a philosophical perspective, which was written by a quantitative sociologist. It really irked me not only because I think it is a ridiculous assertion but it was a blow to my entire project as I was putting ethics under anthropological not philosophical scrutiny. Anger motivates. So here I will attempt at a fist stab at explaining in “lay terms” what composes the craft of anthropology in the hopes of brining some sense to what it is we do.

To attempt this, I am going to at times dip into my own autobiographical experiences as well as borrow some concepts and metaphors from the world of software hacking, but a first a caveat especially about the later. My use of metaphorical comparisons are meant to more richly make a point about something (in this case anthropology) not to equate the two. That is it is a means for an ends not an end in itself. I will also be probably chastised by my anthropological colleagues for “using native categories” as modes of explanation but luckily none but 2 read my blog because they are for the most part so technophobic that it even perturbs me. But hey, I think this is a great exercise. Instead of using anthropological concepts and categories to try to understand hacker culture (which is what I will do with my dissertation anyway), why not use hacker categories to explain anthropology?

So, here it is: Anthropologists essentially “reverse engineer” culture. We don’t just understand and convey surface manifestations of culture (which might be what you find in a National Geographic piece), but we like to consider and examine the underlying mechanisms that produce and reproduce social worlds, that is the source code of culture. We are just as interested in how “culture” is made by the aggregate of social actors who act through social institutions, undertake material practices, and participate in a wide range of mundane and ritual activities (all the while, being attentive to that the fact that culture is shaped by larger socio-historical forces). Sounds hard, doesn’t it? But hey who ever said that reverse engineering was ever easy?
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For the rest of this essay, go here This is admittedly the longest thing I have ever written for my blog so only the brave of heart, enter.