When it comes to something I really like (a good book, or tv series, for example), I carefully pace my consumption of it, much like a good wine, so as to make it last for as long as I can take it. So when I saw the pilot of Firefly nearly three years ago in Seattle, I knew that I would take my sweet time watching this one, especially since Fox (very tragically) canceled the show prematurely, before the end of the season. About 6 months after I partook of my first taste of the Western-Sci-Fi, I got my hands on all the episodes and it took me about 2.5 years to finish off the other 14 episodes.

The show created quite a stir, amassing an underground cult following that helped spearhead the movie production after Fox axed the show. Clearly, the crew had a blast filming the show, and they bonded. This passion came through the screen, this passion the glue taking hold of the audience and I was myself infected by it. But aside from the energy of the show, there were three other elements that I positively loved.

One was how it tweaked with the question of time. While the show had a clear futuristic component with funky spaceships and laser guns (minus the aliens), Joss Whedon brought us, the viewers, smack into the present, into a state of immediacy by melding the future with familiar scenes form the past. By keeping temporal planes in plain view and in play with each other, he collapsed temporal frames and also showed that novelty arises more from the interplay of the new within the framework of the old, instead of breaks in time.

If Joss Whedon collapsed time by keeping various temporalties in plain view, he was also able to play with the themes of freedom and constraint particularly well. The story takes place on a ship, bearing the name of Serenity, and like most ships, whether it is flies through space, or sails on water, they are usually run hierarchically with a captain in charge. And Serenity was no different, with Malcolm Reynolds steering the metaphorical helm (he could not fly the ship), commandeering away with near full authority. But even within such rigidity, Whedon convyed that this was a space of freedom, in which every person was living freely, according to their temperament, predicament, and abilities. United by some unstated and sometimes unclear mission (perhaps just to survive independently in a galaxy run by the “alliance” so that they were at least politically free and did not have to do things like pay taxes), their lives as outlaws were rich and free even while constrained by hierarchy and being confined within a ship. And for me, since I lived in the same sort of situation, ship, captain (no reevers though), I can relate. For some reason, I never felt more free all the while I was beholden to an extremely strict schedule, a captain, and 80 feet of ferro-cement and I have never seen this paradox of constraint and freedom captured so well as Firefly.

Finally, many of the stories not only left you sitting at the edge of your seat in anticipation of some twist (and they were usually quite clever), but as interesting was the moral subtext. The question of what was “right” was never clear cut (especially since there was a fair bit of violence in the show) but was presented with more subtlety and complexity than some simple formula. Ethical choices were thus not deontological but contextual, and I appreciated it.

Probably my favorite episode, in part because it captures delectably the three elements I just described, was The Message . At the end, I actually cried a little. But since I watched it for the first while commuting, I thought I was just tired and susceptible to Hollywood manipulation into a weepy reaction (riding the the NJ transit late a night after a chaotic and long day in the Big Apple will leave just about anyone vulnerable like that) but I saw the episode again last night and even with no tiring train ride as an excuse, I was left pretty sad.

So if you are a sucker at all for Joss Whedon, Westerns, soap operas like character dramas, or science-fiction and you have not watched Serenity, take the next three years to watch 14 episodes. It is well worth your sweet, attentive time.

The topic of styles of leadership in Debian is ongoing and surfaces a little more strongly during the election period, which is happening now. tbm, a past DPL posted a blog entry on the limits of strong-one-person leadership in Debian, thoughts that followed this irc discussion with a long-time developer joey hess. I don’t really have time to say much but for those who work on leadership in larger virtual projects, this discussion may be of interest.

Alchemical Musings has mused some very interesting thoughts on the implications of “free” (as in beer not in speech”) webservices:

Considering Google’s stated ambitions to “house all user files, including: emails, web history, pitcures, bookmakres, etc” the freedom movement better wake up to the fact that there is more to freedom than free software, and we are being outflanked.

Free software is only one corner peice of this puzzle – to complete the jigsaw we need the corners of free data, in a free format. Anything else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About a month ago, I posted an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal on The rising tide of forced treatment.

Below are a range of letters published in the Wallstreet Journal in response to the article. I have not seen the originals but got them via a MindFreedom mailing list.

The collection of letters are the mosy crystalline window into the devastatingly complex issues concerning psychiatric care, human autonomy, law, and suffering that I have seen in a long, long time. Do check it out.

Wed. February22,2006

LETTERS

MindFreedom International sends out alerts as part of our “MindFreedom
Shield” to encourage and support people who are seeking an underground
railroad to shelter them from coerced psychiatric drugging. Such
underground railroads provide support and assistance in a manner that
is completely legal and essential for these individuals. But an
underground railroad itself isn’t a program of MindFreedom, as you
reported.

You described MindFreedom as an organization of “mentally ill people
that opposes coerced drug treatment.” While many members are people who
have experienced abuse in the mental health system, or “psychiatric
survivors” as we call ourselves, we don’t refer to our membership as
“mentally ill.” In fact, many have spent much of their lives
passionately defending themselves against such damaging, false and
unscientific labels.

While you quoted several proponents of forced drugging, you ought to
have quoted even one of the many organized groups of psychiatric
survivors. After all, we are the ones who end up on the sharp end of
the needle.

David Oaks
Director
MindFreedom International
Eugene, Ore.

[other letters:]

For the Mentally Ill: Caring or Incarceration?

One of the great tragedies of modern psychiatry is the large number of
incarcerated individuals who are mentally ill or drug addicted (“A
Doctor’s Fight: More Forced Care for the Mentally Ill,” page one, Feb.
1). This is the inevitable consequence of our reluctance to use caring,
coercive approaches, such as assisted outpatient treatment. A person
suffering from paranoid schizophrenia with a history of multiple
hospitalizations for being dangerous and a reluctance to abide by
outpatient treatment is a perfect example of someone who would benefit
from these approaches. We must balance individual rights and freedom
with policies aimed at caring coercion. Our responsibility to each
other and our respect for personal rights lie at the center of our
social and moral choices as Americans.

The Treatment Advocacy Center is to be commended for its sustained
advocacy on behalf of the most vulnerable mentally ill patients who
lack the insight to seek and continue effective care and benefit from
assisted outpatient treatment.

Steven S. Sharfstein, M.D.
President
American Psychiatric Association
Arlington, Va.

While forced care is sometimes necessary when a person is a danger to
himself or others, the call to expand its usage underestimates the
risks of imposing a different standard of civil liberty onto people
with mental illness than is guaranteed to the rest of us.

E. Fuller Torrey’s movement is part of an attitude of paternalism from
which people with mental illness are working hard to break free.
Moreover, his database of anecdotes on violence is misleading since
most people with mental illness aren’t violent and are more often the
victims of crime, not the assailants. There is a long history of our
country taking away the rights of people with mental illness who are
penalized merely for being “scary” and “burdensome.” It is time to go
forward, not backward.

Anthony M. Zipple, Sc.D., M.B.A.
Chief Executive Officer
Thresholds Psychiatric
Rehabilitation Centers
Chicago

My 41-year-old brother has suffered from serious mental illness since
he was 15. At times, his behavior has become sufficiently threatening
or dangerous to require involuntary hospitalization. Like many others
with this disease, he doesn’t believe that he is ill (a neurological
deficit known as anosognosia) and therefore refuses to voluntarily
comply with treatment or to take medication, even though it has proven
remarkably effective. As a result, my smart, funny and talented brother
has spent much of the past 25 years homeless, jobless and delusional. I
can safely say to the civil libertarians that this isn’t the life he
would have chosen for himself; it was chosen for him by his untreated
illness.

Before Kendra’s Law, there was nothing my family could do to force him
to obtain treatment. Although the law isn’t a panacea and the mental
health system is a disgrace, being forced to stay in treatment is the
only chance he has of resurrecting his life.

Shari L. Steinberg
New York

Dr. Torrey complains about “taking heat” for being “politically
incorrect,” but he’s not really paying any penalty for his position. A
real penalty, however, is being paid by those who are targeted by the
laws he pushes through. To force outpatient “treatment” on anyone who
has ever been on the wrong end of the mental health system because of
the actions of the criminals in Dr. Torrey’s database is as unfair as
it would be to force such treatment on all physicians because of the
actions of Dr. Mengele.

Kent Reedy
San Diego

Using the term “force” to describe state laws authorizing court-ordered
treatment overlooks the point about what these laws are intended to
accomplish. Most people with serious mental illnesses are able to make
informed decisions about treatment. In a minority of cases, mental
illness negatively affects insight and ability to recognize the need
for treatment. The greatest risk is to the individuals themselves.

A New York State Office of Mental Health report shows that the impact
of Kendra’s Law has been positive in reducing hospitalizations,
arrests, homelessness and other consequences from lack of treatment.
And most people treated under Kendra’s Law say it has helped them. When
narrowly crafted and sufficiently protective of civil liberties, laws
authorizing court-ordered outpatient treatment can be both humane and
beneficial.

Michael Fitzpatrick
Executive Director
National Alliance on Mental Illness
Arlington, Va.

My buddies over at decoding liberation recently participated in a video conference to discuss thier paper–An ethical assessment of free software licensing schemes–which produced some interesting blog debate. Worth checking out if you are interested in the nitty-gritty links between licensing and ethical standards.

Here are two good pieces that address the broader ethical implications and political consequences of nanotech and open source:

Revolution in a Box: the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology also has a good discussion on whether open source is feasible for nanotech production, and how it may provide for a more or less ethical brakes in nanotech.

Convergence brings together various luminaries, academics, and acitivists who participate in various social movements, that while distinct, all concern the law of intellectual propert. Here these folks provide us with some thoughts on some of the broader implications of open source in shifitng the global politics of IP. (more…)

My friend over at Spam has been tracking and commenting on the “are google two-timing jerks, now doing ‘some evil’ debacle concerning China and censorship. I have a keen interest in the topic, less because of the human rights issues (which I find fascinating) but because this is the most visible test case that challenges, one may say painfully grinds against, Google’s “Do No Evil” Policy and reveals the depth and stakes of their little social experiment.

I was far from surprised that Google, when it went public, attempted to infuse the hacker ethical spirit into the corporation, which was built, garage on up, on the spirit and literally foundation of open source software. The fact that they were throwing around such talk, reminded me that one of the questions about hacker ethical discourse I have my students probe is: why are hackers and geek-types so quick to pronounce hacker ethical talk (and in such a clear and well-formulated way)?

There is no one answer to this (and I wrote a dissertation that addresses this question and perhaps only gets at small percentage of the answer because the answer is lies in multiple threads of analysis) but, I think, there is something about where they work, i.e., the corporation, that lends itself toward a heightened discussion of ethics. Hackers are bodies who labor, day in, and day out, in a context that is often, at some level (though not total) a threat to the hacker ethical imperative for technical sovereignty. These threats come in various forms, but the two most persistent and locally visible are the figure of the manager (conduits, though, for much larger corporate decisions) and the various bundles of rights (or restrictions, depending on your perspective) collected under the banner of intellectual property law. Within the a context of low -grade constant threat, hacker ethical discourse is pronounced, and omni-present, a sort of weak form of innoculation, that serves to remind them what is “right” and it is the not necessarily the road less traveled, but the road that leads to the best technical solution. And this ethical presence is marked in everything from modes of comportment, styles of dress, and of course joking.. (usually derisive jokes about managers, common in Dilbert).

But as Thorstein Veblen wrote so long ago, the corporate imperative for maximal profits can conflict with churning out the “best quality” technology or product and in fact can managers to “sabotage” the corporation’s material capacities, if this will in some fashion, render the corporation, ruled by absentee owners, more profitable. Veblen writes:

“But it is equally evident that the owner or manager of any given concern or section of this industrial system may be in a position to gain something for himself at the cost of the rest by obstructing, retarding or dislocating this working system at some critical point in such a way as will enable him to get the best of the bargain in his dealings with the rest (vested interest, p. 93). In the Vested Interests, and other books, Veblem champions an engineering ethic that holds many affinities with the hacker” (Oh how he would have simply loved free and open source production).

Decades letter Tracey Kidder, in his masterful account Soul of a New Machine tells the story of a team of computer engineers at Data General Corporation driven to make the best evah’ computer, but alas, there are problems littered due to management. He captures the tension between the mandates of sound engineering and the mandates of sound business practice. The book ends with a somewhat dramatic commentary on the tension:

“The day after the formal announcement, Data General’s famous sales force had been intrudiced to the computer in New York and elsewhere. At the end of the presentation for the samles personell in New York, the regional sales manager got up and give his troops a pep talk.
“What motivates people?” he asked.
He answered his own question, saying, “Ego and the money to buy things that they and
their families want.”
It was a different game now. Clearly, the machine no longer belonged to its makers.”

Thanks to things like open source, the Internet, and most importantly, legal insturments, the machine, in the form of code, does or can belong to its makers…

That aside, what is so interesting about Google’s “Do No Evil” Mantra, is that it is a reflexive regognition that things can go amiss in a corporation, that there is a tension, especially in a public company, between management and the technical comrades, between the stockholders and the employees. And with some understanding of tension, they crafted an ethical shield written that is well-known and even incorporated into their corporate charter.

But whether such a shield is made from paper puff pastries or something more hefty, like steel is now under test. But I really don’t think this is a question about Google’s fortitude. It may be that the structure, the force-field of a publicly trade company, leaves little wiggle room (or perhaps only wiggle room) to apply, abide, much less expand on ethical committments.

That said, I think that this case is more intersting than a situation of “can Google live up to its word.” Instead I laud Google for even trying to infuse an ethical sentiment into the corporate way of life. It is an interesting experiment that is worth bearing out, that if nothing else, will help clarify once again, the limits and possiblities for corporate accountability.

Whether it is the Incompatible Timesharing System from the early days at the MIT lab, Unix, or the Internet, it is clear that hackers encode and realize values through the making of various technologies. But this encoding is not always straightforward and it tends to embody a multiplicity of potentialities that get realized in sometimes conflicting modes.

As interesting is that geeks theorize this, and do so in a dialogically, enganged manner. The following 2 blog entries are by Debian developers and they are about Debian, Unix permissions, and the ways in which openness/opaquness foster different forms of access and possiblities. I don’t have time now to give any analysis but here they are:

From From Joey Hess’ Blog:

I could give many more examples of subsystems in Debian that exist at different point in the spectrum between locked down unix permissions and a wiki. There seems to be a definite pull toward moving away from unix permissions, once ways can be found to do so that are secure or that allow bad changes to be reverted (and blame properly assigned). Cases of moving in the other direction are rare (one case of this is the further locking down of the Debian archive server and BTS server after the server compromise last year).

Anyway, the point of this is that, if you survey the parts of dealing with the project where Debian developers feel most helpless and unempowered, the parts that are over and over again the subject of heated discussions and complaints, you will find that those are the parts of the project where unix permissions still hold sway. This can range from simple cases such as a cron job that only one person can look at and modify[1], to various data files that could perhaps be kept in svn, but aren’t, all the way through to stuff like the Debian keyring. I would love to see a full list developed, although many of the things that remain are obscure little corners like certian blacklists in the BTS, bits of the buildd infrastructure that only a half dozen people know about, etc.

And then a reply from former Debian release manager, Anthony Towns:

One interesting approach, to my mind, is worrying less about permissions and more about space – so that different people with different ideas on how to do things can do them independently. That’s part of the idea behind usertags and usercategories: rather than having people try to find an imperfect compromise, let them work on the same stuff in the way they actually prefer. That reduces the risk of carelessness, in that you stop having any reason to bother other people, and also reduces the problem of restrictions, in that if you don’t have permission to work in someone else’s area, you can just setup your own area and work there.

Perhaps the worst problem is if the drawbacks feed on each other: a restrictive system turns away contributions, which causes prospective contributors to get frustrated and hence careless, which then reinforces the reasons that the restrictions were put their in the first place and diminishes the chance they’ll be reconsidered. That’s a hard cycle to break, but it’s not one where anyone really wins.

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.