For an Overt Politics of Software

I have recently been reading the work in geography on software/information/geodata, and there is a lot of good stuff there, but one large concern I have is that the work, in general, seems to be quite aloof, or detached, or trying to stay above the fray, to remain non-committal, as though that were the more professional, academic stance to take.  All this detachment seems to have produced an upshot that is something like: “with all the new technologies coming into our lives in the past 10 years or so, it is important to think through their implications instead of just adopting them uncritically.”  One piece even goes so far as to say that we shouldn’t try to judge if what software does is good or bad, we should just see it as productive, as making things happen, and then try to understand how it works.

While I am all for understanding how it works (technically and socially both), I think that if this is all the literature is willing to do politically (I have certainly not read all of it), then it is failing spectacularly to do what is needed.  I think we desperately need to explicitly engage the political/ethical questions that software raises, to discuss extensively what it means for software to be good or bad (again, both technically and socially), and to never cease having that debate.  One obvious example of what such engagement looks like is the free software movement, which for years has been joining the political battle by advocating something like a “code commons” and decrying the model of proprietary corporate code.  Oddly, the question of free vs. enclosed software rarely comes up in the literature, as far as I can tell.

For my part, I think what “the good” means in this arena is that people produce, distribute, and maintain code themselves, rather than having another entity (most often a large software corporation) do it for them.  Within those communities, the code should be common, which is to say it is freely shared (and never enclosed), because it is understood to be necessarily a product of a whole community’s collective intelligence.  And lastly, the skills to do this work (producing, distributing, and maintaining the code) should be widely distributed within the community.  The work should not fall to (or be hoarded by) a small group of experts.

Of course that is only one position, and it begs other positions and continued debate.  But as academics I think we should be waist deep in such debates, rather than hovering above them and declining archly to take sides.

 

Linux is a Cancer (That’s a Good Thing)

I am on sabbatical for two quarters, and I am taking the opportunity to write about free (and open source) software for the first time.  It is ballooning quickly, chaotically, from a conference paper into a book–in a good way I think.  I am trying to relax and let the inquiry carry me where it will, not trying to discipline it into the conference paper.  That might be bad for the conference paper, but it is good for the overall inquiry (I hope).  We will see.

One of the many side flows I have been carried off into was the case of former Microsoft CEO (and current LA Clippers owner!) Steve Ballmer, who in 2001 said “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.”  The take-away from this is usually to vilify Ballmer because he called Linux a mean name, but I think there is something quite important here.  I think Ballmer is really worried.  What he is getting at is that the GNU General Public License, under which much Linux software is distributed, prevents the person receiving the software from enclosing it.  That is, when you receive software under the open-source GPL, you are not allowed to then turn around and make the code closed-source (i.e. you can’t transform it into “intellectual property”), even if you alter it significantly.  Since Microsoft’s empire is built on intellectual property, on code that is very closed-source, Ballmer is genuinely worried about the possibility that code licensed under the GPL, if it got into Microsoft’s stream, would bar them from claiming intellectual property rights on the whole stream.  [Here the scenario would be something like: a certain tool that is licensed under the GPL becomes dominant (something like, say, OpenSSH) and more or less has to be used as a part of a larger entity (say, a server OS).]  But Ballmer’s fear could have run even deeper.  Even if Microsoft were vigilant in keeping any GPL code out of their products, if everyone else adopted the GPL ethos, which is to make software freely available, open, and held in common, where would that leave Microsoft, which is dependent on the model of software as enclosed intellectual property?

A less-quoted Ballmer attack on Linux came in 2000, at Microsoft’s financial analysts’ meeting, where he said

Linux is a tough competitor. There’s no company called Linux, there’s barely a Linux road map. Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it. That is, it’s free.  And I’m not trying to make fun of it, because it’s a real competitive issue. Today, I would say, we still don’t see a lot of Linux competition in most quarters on the desktop, and we see a lot of Linux competition in some server markets. And we could either say, hey, Linux is going to roll over the world, but I don’t see that happening. That’s not what’s going on right now.

He is sort of right about Linux.  It did spring organically from the earth, in a way.  Significant parts of it are still community-managed.  But corporations (Red Hat, Canonical, Sun, and now Google) have played and continue to play a very large role in its development and distribution.  It does have characteristics of communism, actual communism rather than State-socialism-that-claims-to-be-communism, in that the code is meant to be held in common by all.  And, interestingly, in 2000 Ballmer got the competition part mostly right.  Linux was not and has not become competitive on the desktop.  But Linux very much became competitive in the (probably more important) server market, where is now holds a controlling position over Microsoft.  And, what Ballmer did not see, Linux (as the core of the Android operating system) became the dominant software on phones and tablets as well.

The struggle is over, and Microsoft lost.  Their closed-source, proprietary model, which was absolutely central to their success, has been mostly superseded by the open-source, un-owned, free-of-cost model.  In a way, Linux did roll over the world.

The question now is not so much open- vs. closed-source software, but whether open-source software will be developed, distributed, and maintained by active communities of people themselves, or whether that work will be done for them, by large corporations.  I think it is a vital question, and it is one the Linux community has lots of experience with.

Putting the State Out to Pasture (#!)

Communists Like Us isn’t all that good.  It is sloppy, vague, jargony, and contradicts itself. It seems very much like Negri and Guattari often couldn’t agree, and at those points they obfuscated their argument with hard-to-parse sentences.

But they do have some very good lines on the relationship between the communist movement and the State.  “The traditional workers’ movement,” they say, “wanted…the conquest of state power [and] then the progressive disappearance of the State.”  G&N argue that

the first basic task of the revolutionary communist movement consists in having done with this sort of conception and affirming the movement’s radical separation not only from the state but…more fundamentally, from the very model of the capitalist state and all its successors…(p. 96).

Communists must develop their own forms of organization, and they must manage their economic and political affairs directly, for themselves.

The state, for its part, can live out its days in the isolation and encirclement reserved for it by a reconstructed civil society! [Echoes of ‘On the Jewish Question’ here.]  But if it appears about to come out of retreat and to reconquer our spaces of freedom, then we will respond by submerging it within a new kind of general mobilization (p. 98).

We do not confront, fight, and smash the state.  We do not seize the state and then use it to create the conditions by which it withers.  Rather, we engage, starting now, in the positive project of building a viable alternative way of life, another polity without the state [Virno: ‘non-State republic’].  We lose ourselves in this project.  Over time, we so develop our common ability to rule ourselves that we look up one day from our work and notice the state, over in the corner, living “out its days in isolation,” having fallen into disuse, having become obsolete, having been put out to pasture.  And we wonder what we ever used it for, why we ever thought we needed it in the first place.

This might seem like a grand hope, a bit of fantasy, but I think we should not waste time wondering whether it is possible, we should just get to work.  We should work on augmenting those projects to govern ourselves that are already underway, in whatever guise, in whatever arena.

Certainly the examples of this abound, but the one I am feeling most acutely these days, one I feel as I write this, has to do with my move from Windows (proprietary, corporate, profit-driven) to Linux (open-source, shared, often-not-corporate).  When I first began I worried extensively about what I would no longer be able to do, about whether I could really live (and work) outside the mainstream, outside the comfort and security of the software-that-everyone-uses.  I set up all my machines to dual boot, thinking I would try my best to run Linux most of the time and then run back to Windows when Linux failed me.  How silly those fears seem now.  I could not have ever imagined how stable, solid, efficient, aesthetically pleasing, and functional Linux would be.  It is a joy to come to learn and work with.  I never boot windows.  I never need to.  It never comes up.  When I find myself in a Windows environment (on some other computer), I have that feeling, the feeling of wondering why I ever thought I couldn’t live without this software.  Windows (and Apple, it goes without saying) is made utterly unnecessary by the many, many different open-source and free software projects that have created, on their own and outside the state and outside the corporate environment, a thoroughly better way to live.  Really.  Entirely better.  It is a slam dunk.  I myself am particularly indebted to Debian, Crunchbang, Tint2, Openbox, X.org, LibreOffice, XFCE (for Thunar), Geany, and many others.  And there are many, many other projects beyond these, most of them not corporations.  There is a whole multitude of people together producing code that is ours, that belongs to everyone, and that is rock-solid stable (usually) on the back end and totally gorgeous on the front.

So however obvious it seems that we can’t govern ourselves without the state, or that we can’t produce without capital, it’s not true.  We can.  We already do.  We’re not there yet, to be sure, but the day is coming when we will look at the State the way I am now looking at Windows.  Put them out to pasture.  Let’s get back to work.