As I was packing for Chicago today, I looked out my window and decided, it was way, I mean WAY too nice of a day to stay home all day so I got on my bike and headed to the Golden Gate Bridge where I was stunned, as usual, by this view. How nice it is to bike here in and I like biking, as odd as it may sound, as a means of “virtual writing.” I wish someone would invent this little gadget that would allow one to telepathically “type” one’s thoughts straight from the brain to one’s computer. When I bike I have all these really clear ideas and it is as if I start to mentally write as I pedal away. And today, I was pedaling to some last thoughts about the Netherlands that I wanted to write before they evaporate forever from my mind, which tends to happen with me (and hence the need for the gadget)… There are three things that I was thinking about: bikes, the law, and hackers all withing the context of praxis (a fancy word for practice or activity). I can write an endless amount on each of them but for the sake of my own time sanity, I am going to try to keep it ahem, less verbose that usual. Let’s see if I succeed

So, if there is one thing that I would have LOVED to take a picture of (as it really struck me as amusing, cute, and odd),was that of the “Dutch pre-teen couple” holding hands while riding their bikes. I mean, my first reaction was like “that is cute but so ridiculous… They are riding bikes yet holding hands!” And then I moved on to “damn, that is cool. I wish I could do that.. and how the hell do they do that?.” To deciding that the very fact of a young couple in love, or at least in lust, holding hands while biking, succinctly but powerfully sums up what makes riding a bike in the Netherlands, so very different of an act from riding a bike here in the US. In short, it is a way of life for many folks there as it is how people get around, permeating not just the national psyche but the very way that people use their bodies. People can thus thoughtlessly hold hands as if it were a leisurely stroll down the street. There is an intimacy with this wonderful piece of technology that here in the US is an intimacy that gets formed instead with cars and increasingly with the SUV. Unfortunately. Not only are they a wee-bit more expensive but they are a wee-lot more worse for the environment and well, it seems like holding hands on bikes is way more fun that holding hands in a car (yes, yes, I know you can do more in a car but stop thinking dirty like that)…

So, aside from the bodily praxis around bikes, I was fascinated at how the law works in the Netherlands. The short of it, is that it doesn’t work, like it does in the US, and hallelujah for that. I mean, it does work but the letter of the law often gets ignored in place of other norms and practices that are built from the ground up instead of the top down. I believe the official name for this practice is gedogen which means something like “official blind eye” and it allows for, well a pretty free and at least fluid society. I think in so many ways, this legal practice is about the total opposite from American legal culture, which can be summed up nicely in the following New Yorker cartoon . Our legal praxis cultivates an orientation towards the letter of the law in which everything is micro-managed (and expensively so), in which the underlying assumption is to screw your fellow person over, goddammitttttttttttttttt, if you can. What I think is so ironic is that here in America, one of the most common subjects is that of FREEDOM of this or that, blah, blah, and while on the one hand, I do think it is a relatively free society, there are so many countless ways where we Americans are prisoners, prisoners, especially to our legal minutia and RULES. No drinking beer at the beach, no swimming, no talking loudly, no skateboarding, NO. NO NO. If you did not hear me: “NO!”

It really is a negative culture, no? And you know, that I do hold the right to sue sacred but only because it should be used as a final recourse, as a powerful weapon to right wrongs, not to get something for nothing and create a state in society based on fear and mistrust. And so it is funny, here in the states we try to “legalize freedom” and have such a strong ideological penchant for freedom but in practice, in praxis, it is like so much less visible than in a place like Netherlands, where freedom gets practiced through people doing stuff, like smoking pot, taking over buildings, protesting etc. Doing is well, the means by which to really build values. Though discussion and ideas are important, in the end it is doing, acting, rather than thinking and pontification which makes for a solid manifestation of social values. Just like biking as a way of life, one has to intimately do an ethic for it to be instantiated (hence the importance of free software projects, they allow hackers to exercise their ethic and thus build it). And that is why I think there is not so much of a real terrain of freedom here in the US… We don’t have many spaces/places to exercise it. I mean the suburb, is like the antithesis of a spatial architecture for freedom. Mistrust and fear is what many of our spaces are about (I will build my house as far as possible from yours and get rid of sidewalks so that I never have to actually see another human being). Anyway, I can go on forever about this but I have thought about making my next anthropology project (I have so many…) some sort of cross-cultural comparison on how the law functions in the popular imaginary, how it is inculcated in the youth, and the means by which people reconfigure/resist it, comparing Amsterdam with some American city. Now that sounds like a nice next project….

Finally, hackers. Why so many in the Netherlands? Well, I really can’t answer this with much substance although I think I will start with my mild attack of Manuel Castells characterization here of “hacker culture” in “The Internet Galaxy” (a much more substantial attack which will come soon when I finally get around to writing this conference paper next week but a good book in many ways). He writes:

“Indeed, serious hackers primarily exist as hackers on-line. If postmodern anthropologist landed in a hacker meeting and tried to identify tribal clans on the basis of these symbols [that is shirts and stickers related to things like Star Wars, The Matrix, Enemy of the State], they would miss the essence of the culture. Because as Wayner (2000) emphasized, the hacker culture, and its internal distinctions, are all about mental constructions and technological divides.” p. 50

So, I am not sure what the last sentence means nor what he means by the “serious” hacker (I think I am going to now ask during my interview: “are you a., you know, serious hacker?” Castells overlooks how important off-line arenas are or more precisely, what role they might play within the hacker sphere. And while I don’t think it is an either/or situations (when is life so black and white anyway? I mean it is for George Bush but well), the online is indispensable, but off-line arenas play a really really vital part to hacker culture whether it be in the countless geek dyadic/triadic friendships, small geek nodes in local areas where geeks really hang out in person, and the large conferences that though they happen infrequently (like any good ritual should) are incredibly important for fostering a sense of community and for adding in some cases, like h2k2 and hal, an overt political perspective. And which brings me to why the such strong hacker presence in the Netherlands. Well, there is of course historical contingencies that play an important role (the publication of hacktic, the fact that one of Debian DPLs is from .nl) but I think the fact that a lot of the techie community actually sees each other in person, even if infrequently, adds a certain force to what already are strong webs of relationships formed online. While I was there, I went to countless, I mean a lot, of techie, social gatherings, from hippesfromhell parties, to a #koffie dimsum lunch and well, afternoon of drinking koffie and beer, to two Debian meetings, and even more. The physical sociality reinforces what already is a strong form of online sociality so it is not really an either or situation but a mORe one. And in some funny ways, the locality of groups whether it is the (primarily) west coast yak , the (primarily) midwest moneky.org the (primarily) Dutch hippiesfromhell (and there are countless, I mean, countless others not to mention all the 2600 and LUG groups) act like web-like nodes, that connect the online with the off-line as well as connect different groups together as there are always members of these different associations that participate in multiple nodes. You might still have hacker culture without the off-line interactions, but I have a feeling that it might be distinct and that it could not help explain why the streangth of certain nodes over others. And now that I come to think about it what might help to explain the persistence, strength and distinctiveness of “hacker culture” is precisely the melding of on and off-line sociality. For each one has elements that are distinct (again, I don’t think it is either/or) so that participating in both domains also translates into an increased praxis of sociality in which people experience many different types of interacting and modes of communication. And in the end, it is praxis that really is the super-glue of social life….