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Published Dec 23 2010 by Liberty & Solidarity (http://www.libertyandsolidarity.org/node/104) , Archived Jan 11 2011

Wikileaks, Karl Marx and youby Alistair Davidson

An opinion/analysis piece by a supporter of L&S

Despite blanket media coverage of Wikileaks and JulianAssange, there has been little discussion of the fact thatAssange is merely one leader within a large and complicatedsocial movement. The better analyses have found itinteresting that the Swedish Pirate Party are aiding Wikileaks;some note links (http://www.webstock.org.nz/blog/2010/the-blast-shack/) to the German Chaos Computer Club. But only “geeks”and “hackers” (technology workers) are aware that all ofthese organisations are members of the same movement.

This social movement, which has been termed the “freeculture movement”, has a thirty year history. It incorporateselements reminiscent of earlier workers’ movements:elements of class struggle, political agitation, and radicaleconomics. The movement’s cadre, mainly technologyworkers, have been locked in conflict with the ruling classover the political and economic nature of information itself. AsWikileaks demonstrates, the outcome will have implications forall of us.The free culture movement exists as a consequenceof the internet’s political economy. Personal computers haveradically transformed the economic nature of information.Before the 1970s, a given piece of information was tied to aphysical object - a piece of paper, an LP [long-playedphonograph record], a roll of film. Entire industries were builton selling paper, LP’s and rolls of film with particular bits ofinformation on them. Then the personal computer arrived andsuddenly information of all kinds could be duplicated infinitelyat minimal cost - and distributed by the internet to a global audience. Every human could havea copy of every piece of art ever created for the cost of a broadband connection.

In the terms of capitalist economics, every good has a marginal cost, which is the cost ofproducing one more item. Computers reduce the marginal cost of information to zero, and theinternet makes distribution, legal or otherwise, trivial. Information has become "non-excludable"(copying cannot be prevented) and "non-rivalrous" (if I give you information, I keep my copy ofthat information). In this situation, it is almost impossible to treat information as a commodity -as capitalist economics would have it, information is a public good(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good) , like roads or national defense.

As a result, there is a contradiction within capitalism. The most obvious source of profit, thevery reason for a capitalist society to invest in information technology, is to extract value byselling information as a commodity. Meanwhile information technology has steadily underminedthe practicality of treating information as property.

As computers have rendered “intellectual property rights” unenforceable, the remaining methodof privatising information is secrecy. Information collection and secrecy is the business model of

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of privatising information is secrecy. Information collection and secrecy is the business model ofGoogle and Facebook - collecting and selling information about us to their advertisers.Information collection and secrecy are also the core functions of the modern security state. It isin this context that the immense social significance of Wikileaks’ actions becomes apparent:Wikileaks is a key part of the free culture movement’s assault on the bastions of privatisedinformation.

The present situation was predicted by visionary hackers over thirty years ago, and they set outto ensure the victory of free culture over proprietary culture, open organisation over closed, andprivacy over Big Brother.

The word hacker predates the personal computer, originating at the MIT Tech Model Rail Club inthe 1950s. Amongst geeks, it is used to mean a technically skilled individual who is driven tolearn and experiment, a person who believes in sharing what they’ve learned with thecommunity.

Hacker culture proper originated in the 1970s, in hobbyist clubs dedicated to the first personalcomputers. Hackers quickly became used to copying software freely - after all, it cost nothing toshare, and reading the software’s “source code” was educational. Software became the firstmodern information good: infinitely replicable, at no cost.

However, others were already seeking to change the nature of software, to turn it into acommodity. How else, they asked, could the creators afford to eat? In 1976, Bill Gates famouslycomplained (http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/gateswhine.html) :

As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardwaremust be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who workedon it get paid? Is this fair? ... Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? ... Thefact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software …but there isvery little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thingyou do is theft.

This was an early appearance of the new contradiction in capitalism - a conflict between thepath of greatest production (infinite copying) and the existing source of profits (artificialscarcity). Karl Marx argued that conflict between new and old modes of production is at the coreof social change:

The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual lifeprocess in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, onthe contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. ... At a certain stageof development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with theexisting relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms –with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation leadsooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. --Karl Marx,A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy(http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm)

As Marx might have predicted, Gates’ plea fell on deaf ears. By the mid 1980s, sharing softwarehad never been easier and Internet Bulletin Boards were widespread. Hackers and others wouldmake a computer-to-computer phone call to join discussions, and to download illegal copies ofsoftware. Hacker conferences and organisations emerged, including the left-wing ChaosComputer Club in Germany, and later the apolitical DefCon and “liberal” HOPE in the UnitedStates.

From its experiences of the new technology, this anarchic subculture developed a sharedpolitical and moral sense, now known as the Hacker Ethic:

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political and moral sense, now known as the Hacker Ethic:

Access to computers - and anything which might teach you something about the waythe world works - should be unlimited and total.Mistrust authority - promote decentralization.You can create art and beauty on a computer.Computers can change your life for the better.All information should be free.

-- Steven Levy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic)

The similarity of the ethic to older conceptions of an egalitarian society has been noted by thediscussion group Project Oekonux(http://www.oekonux.org/texts/marketrelations.html#The%20Ideology%20of%20the%20Founders%20of%20Free%20Software) :

The critique of market exchange and of money, the rejection of hierarchy and borders,the critique of contemporary work and the revindication of passion and freedom asprimary motivations, of cooperation and of sharing as the foundations of new relations,all this is found, to a degree more or less elaborated and coherent, in the "hacker ethic."Now these are elements that form part of the foundation of the communist project.

Some thinkers sought to move beyond an ethic and develop a political programme. The firstand most important anti-propertarian theorist and organiser to emerge from the hacker worldwas Richard M Stallman. Stallman is a controversial figure, a geek's geek and not always politeto his political opponents. In spite of his apparent interpersonal shortcomings, he is widelyrespected as the founder of the free culture movement, perhaps the first person to understandthe new economic situation, and certainly the first person to do anything concrete about it.

Stallman was driven to action when he saw the nature of software begin to change -increasingly, companies kept secret the details necessary to modify their programs, and suedanyone who distributed copies. The first modern information good was becoming a commodity,against its economic nature and against the Hacker Ethic.

In response, Stallman created a new ideology, Free Software (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) , declaring software-as-commodity to be a moral evil: Free software is a matter of theusers' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

The freedom to run the program, for any purposeThe freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needsThe freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighborThe freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public,so that the whole community benefits

(note that "free" here does not refer to the cost, as in "free beer”, but to freedom, as in "freespeech" - the word has two meanings in English)

As information workers, Stallman and his peers owned their means of production and hadaccess to the means of distribution - by the 1980s, all they needed to bypass capital entirelywas a computer and a phone line. In 1984, Stallman began a public collaborative effort to builda complete set of software that respected the four freedoms, announcing it with the declaration(http://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.html) :

I consider that the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it withother people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them,making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with otherusers in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a

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users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or asoftware license agreement. ... So that I can continue to use computers without dishonor,I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able toget along without any software that is not free.

He founded a political group, the Free Software Foundation, and in collaboration with the lawyerand free software leader Eben Moglen popularised another new concept - copyleft. A “copyleft”license is a special copyright license that brings legal enforcement to the four freedoms. Itgrants anyone the right to modify and share an information good, provided that anymodifications are shared according to the same license. In other words, you may treat the workas communal property, as long as your own modifications also become communal property.

To hackers, avid readers of science fiction, it seemed obvious that in the near future all ofhumanity’s information would be stored on a global computer network. Stallman realised that ifstate or private interests controlled the software running the network, they could monitor orcensor any information they wished - and decided that humanity as a whole must have theability to share and modify all software. This idea was most fully developed by the lawyerLawrence Lessig when he coined the phrase code is law (http://pdf.codev2.cc/Lessig-Codev2.pdf) .

In real space, we recognize how laws regulate - through constitutions, statutes, and otherlegal codes. In cyberspace we must understand how a different “code” regulates - how thesoftware and hardware (i.e., the “code” of cyberspace) that make cyberspace what it isalso regulate cyberspace as it is. As William Mitchell puts it, this code is cyberspace’s“law.” “Lex Informatica,” as Joel Reidenberg first put it, or better, “code is law.”

Cyberspace is regulated by software, much as the real world is regulated by law. It follows thatif there is to be a free culture, then software must be free - otherwise, corporate and stateinterests have an unacceptable ability to collect and censor information.

These trends - the end of information scarcity, the distribution of the means of production intothe hands of information workers, the development of a broader hacker community and ethic,the emergence of ideological leaders and organisations, and the creation of a legal theory -combined in the 1990s to produce an extremely rare economic event: the arrival of an entirelynew mode of production. The first example of the new mode was the Linux project.

By the early 1990s, the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Project had assembled all the freesoftware necessary to run a computer apart from one, known as the “kernel”. Finnish hackerLinus Torvalds created the free kernel “Linux” as a hobby project, licensing it under the FSF'scopyleft license. Linus’ hobby soon became the first large engineering project to be conductedentirely online, and it developed faster than anyone envisaged. Twenty years later, it hasbenefited from millions of contributions from many thousands of workers around the world.

Free software - built on GNU and Linux - is now ubiquitous on internet servers, and recentlybegan leading the market in smartphones (thanks to Google’s Android). The GNU/Linuxecosystem is a completely unique phenomenon - an engineering and artistic project of immensescope conducted across thirty years using a global workforce, with most of the work comingfrom volunteers simply because they enjoyed contributing.

Eric S Raymond, in his seminal essay the Cathedral and the Bazaar(http://www.catb.org/%7Eesr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html#catbmain) , made anearly attempt to explain what was going on:

Linux was the first project for which a conscious and successful effort to use the entireworld as its talent pool was made. I don't think it's a coincidence that the gestationperiod of Linux coincided with the birth of the World Wide Web, and that Linux left itsinfancy during the same period in 1993 - 1994 that saw the takeoff of the ISP industryand the explosion of mainstream interest in the Internet. Linus was the first person wholearned how to play by the new rules that pervasive Internet access made possible. While

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learned how to play by the new rules that pervasive Internet access made possible. Whilecheap Internet was a necessary condition for the Linux model to evolve, I think it was notby itself a sufficient condition. Another vital factor was the development of a leadershipstyle and set of cooperative customs that could allow developers to attract co-developersand get maximum leverage out of the medium. But what is this leadership style and whatare these customs? They cannot be based on power relationships - and even if they couldbe, leadership by coercion would not produce the results we see.

Information workers were cooperating globally and without coercion to produce property thatwas to be communally owned. Non-coercive productive relations were inevitable given theunderlying economic truth - a computer, internet access, and communally-owned free softwareare all the productive capital a computer programmer needs. The cooperative, ad-hoc andvoluntary nature of GNU/Linux development is exactly the behaviour Marx predicted wouldemerge from free access to productive capital:

Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production,the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed onthe products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessedby them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists inan indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceedsof labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning. …labor [will] become not only a means of life but life's prime want -- Karl Marx, Critiqueof the Gotha Programme (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index.htm)

Always confining themselves to information property alone, because of its non-scarce nature,the philosophers of the free software movement started to sound like libertarian communists -even though many in the community would not subscribe to leftist politics. FSF Lawyer EbenMoglen made the case forcefully in his essay Anarchism Triumphant(http://www.blagblagblag.org/anarchism/index.html) :

At the center of the digital revolution, with the executable bitstreams that makeeverything else possible, propertarian regimes not only do not make things better, theycan make things radically worse. Property concepts, whatever else may be wrong withthem, do not enable and have in fact retarded progress. In the network society,anarchism (or more properly, anti-possessive individualism) is a viable politicalphilosophy … because defection is impossible, free riders are welcome, which resolvesone of the central puzzles of collective action in a propertarian social system.

Some hackers were unhappy with these ideological developments. On the grounds that businesswas perturbed by the FSF’s rhetoric, Eric S Raymond formed the breakaway Open SourceInitiative (http://www.opensource.org/history) to focus discussion on the technical superiority of opendevelopment models, avoiding troublesome talk about “freedom” and the nature of property.

Raymond had been invited out by Netscape to help them plan their browser source-coderelease ... we might finally be able to get the corporate world to listen to what the hackercommunity had to teach about the superiority of an open development process. Theconferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude thathad been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the samepragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape. They brainstormedabout tactics and a new label. "Open source", contributed by Chris Peterson, was the bestthing they came up with.

The Open Source Initiative helped to make business comfortable in the free software world, butthe internet continued to have a troubled relationship with capitalism.

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the internet continued to have a troubled relationship with capitalism.

From the 1990s hackers and artists found themselves caught in an intensifying class conflict, asintellectual property owners manipulated the political process to strengthen laws protectinginformation’s status as property, even as that status became increasingly unenforceable inpractise. To hackers, this could only be seen as an attempt to extract needless rent from anaturally abundant resource.

“Content owners”, alarmed by the emergence of file-sharing websites, began building digitallocks, called Digital Rights Management (DRM), into DVDs, mp3s and even e-books. The hackercommunity was deeply offended by the idea of books that could not be resold or lent, and setabout breaking the locks as fast as they could be designed. A class struggle was being foughtsimultaneously at the points of information production and consumption, because in the world ofcomputers the point of production is the point of consumption.

Under intense music industry lobbying, several countries including the United Statesimplemented laws banning any technology capable of bypassing DRM to allow copying. A seriesof high-profile prosecutions followed, most famously that of Russian programmer DmitriSkylarov, who was arrested after giving a conference speech in the United States explaininghow to break Adobe’s e-book DRM.

Under increasing attack, the wider geek and hacker communities began to radicalise to defendfree speech and free information. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was formed to offer legalsupport. Various hacker groups adopted political aims, most often aimed at guaranteeing freespeech and defending the free internet.

The hackers were fighting the struggle, but during the 2000s the means of production anddistribution for every kind of artist became available to anyone with a computer - free softwarebegan to allow the creation of a truly free culture.

Lawrence Lessig, who had predicted this as part of his “Code is Law” theory, founded CreativeCommons, an organisation dedicated to giving individual writers, musicians and artists easy-to-understand ways of allowing others to share and modify their work, with the stated aim(http://lessig.org/blog/2002/12/cc_launches.html) of bringing the freedoms of free software to all art:

It is no accident that those who understand this are those closest to technology. Ourchallenge will be to find ways to explain it so other creators get it as well .... Our single,overarching aim: build the public domain, by building projects that expand the range ofcreative work available for others to build upon.

Perhaps most importantly, they created a copyleft license for non-software works. CreativeCommons provided the legal framework for the current flowering of free culture - Wikipedia, forexample, may be copied and modified by anyone under a Creative Commons copyleft license.Artists began to join the free culture movement, dissatisfied with capital’s notion of them asinterchangeable “content creators” and enticed by the possibilities of distribution free fromindustry control.

In 2003 now-infamous filesharing website the Pirate Bay, which has pioneered partnerships withCreative Commons artists, was spun off from Swedish group Piratbyrån. Piratbyrån was a think-tank on the nature of intellectual property created by hackers, artists and left activists tocounter the Swedish Antipiratbyrån (Anti-Piracy Bureau). In 2006, they founded the PirateParty, winning two seats in the European Parliament. and there are now Pirate Parties incountries across the globe campaigning for weaker intellectual property laws and free speech onthe internet.

At least some members of Piratbyrån are radically anti-intellectual property, and their vision isconsciously opposed to information as a commodity:

The copyright industry today likes to present the problem as if internet were just a wayfor so-called “consumers” to get so-called ”content”, and that we now just got to have ”a

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for so-called “consumers” to get so-called ”content”, and that we now just got to have ”areasonable distribution” of money between ISP’s and content industry ... It is totallywrong to regard our role as to represent “consumer interests”. On the contrary, it’s allabout leaving the artificial division of humanity into the two groups ”producers” and”consumers” behind. ... We are now pounding the old mass medial aura and we are in astate of transgressing the hierarchical consumer-producer society. -- Rasmus Fleischer ofPiratbyrån speaking at the 2005 Chaos Communication Congress(http://web.archive.org/web/20060206151626/http://www.piratbyran.org/index.php?

view=articles&id=107)

The Pirate Bay were not merely pirates - they saw themselves as taking deliberate politicalactions to undermine the existing economic structure in favour of a new mode of production.

Piratbyrån itself disbanded in June 2010 and the Pirate Bay was sold, however the high level ofsupport for Wikileaks provided by Scandinavian activists and the Pirate Party suggests that thewider milieu is alive and well.

Wikileaks also has roots in an influential 1990s discussion group, the Cypherpunk mailing list.“Cypherpunk”, formed from the words “cipher”, or code, and “cyberpunk”, a science fictiongenre full of rogue hackers fighting corporate tyrants, indicates the members’ loose ideology -that the anonymity and security provided by computerised cryptography (“crypto”) could createa new society free from coercion, a system know as crypto-anarchy(http://www.spinnaker.com/crypt/cyphernomicon/CP-FAQ) .

Many of us see strong crypto as the key enabling technology for a new economic andsocial system, a system which will develop as cyberspace becomes more important. Asystem which dispenses with national boundaries, which is based on voluntary (even ifanonymous) free trade. At issue is the end of governments as we know them today. ...Strong crypto permits unbreakable encryption, unforgeable signatures, untraceableelectronic messages, and unlinkable pseudonymous identities. This ensures that sometransactions and communications can be entered into only voluntarily. External force,law, and regulation cannot be applied. This is "anarchy," in the sense of no outside rulersand laws.

The cypherpunks were ahead of their time, clearly anticipating Wikileaks’s use of anonymous,encrypted internet drop-boxes by 15 years or more - but then Julian Assange was a regularposter to the list. The hacker community has created the future it used to speculate about.

In one notorious incident, cypherpunk Jim Bell published an essay entitled “AssassinationPolitics”, which discussed the creation of a completely anonymous site where users couldsponsor the assassination of corrupt politicians. Bell was later jailed for spying on federalagents, themselves sent to spy on him for writing the essay.

Assange laid the philosophical groundwork for Wikileaks when he replied to Assassination Politicsin his State and Terrorist Conspiracies (http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-and-the-computer-conspiracy-%E2%80%9Cto-destroy-this-invisible-government%E2%80%9D/) :

How can we reduce the ability of a conspiracy to act? … We can split the conspiracy,reduce or eliminating important communication between a few high weight links ormany low weight links. Traditional attacks on conspiratorial power groupings, such asassassination, have cut high weight links by killing, kidnapping, blackmailing orotherwise marginalizing or isolating some of the conspirators they were connected to. ...The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoiain its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficientinternal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) andconsequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto

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consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold ontopower as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy,secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjustsystems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upperhand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace themwith more open forms of governance.

With a single mechanism, Assange demonstrates the political implications of the new economicsof information. If all information is can be copied freely, then organisations may be faced withno choice but to conduct the majority of their dealings openly. He has simply carried Eric SRaymond’s conclusion about Linux - that its open organisational model would always be moreefficient than Microsoft’s closed model - into the political realm.

Wikileaks is the first concrete realisation of the crypto-anarchist dream: completely anonymousleaking, dealing blows to tyranny. However it has also highlighted the weak points in the freeinternet, surviving dangers to freedom of speech and the new mode of production.

Perhaps the most obvious is that large corporations control the physical infrastructure of theinternet - the big servers and all the actual wires from place to place. Another danger is themonopolisation of some services - social networking by Facebook, search by Google. And withthe recent cutting-off of Wikileaks funds by PayPal, Visa and Mastercard, the danger of state-corporate action to deny funds has become starkly apparent.

As is typical, the hacker community has been working on solutions for some time. There areprojects to create wireless “mesh” networks, and projects to create distributed, openalternatives to Facebook and Google. There is even the Bitcoin project (http://www.bitcoin.org/) ,which has the ambitious goal of creating a distributed virtual currency.

Marx described, in broad strokes, the ways in which political economy shapes society andhistory, but left the detail up to those alive at the time. The activism, organisation and ideologywe see in the hacker community today are the material consequence of a new mode ofproduction, a fundamental shift in the political economy of information. The free culturemovement has (so far) defeated all attempts, both legal and technological, to reimposeinformation scarcity. If Marx was right then this is simply because the winds of history arebehind us.

There is no way to predict where this will end - some hackers theorise that in the future,manufacturing will decentralise in the same way as information production, a miniature factoryin every home if you will. The processes favouring decentralisation and organisational opennesswill continue to gain strength, as will the reaction against those processes. The only certainty isthat the economic nature of information has changed forever. That fact will still be transformingour society a century from now.

© 2010 Alistair Davidson. Originally published at http://www.libertyandsolidarity.org/node/104(http://www.libertyandsolidarity.org/node/104) . Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/) .

Editorial Notes

I don't think a high percentage of people who use or create open source software would identify with Karl Marx.Julian Assange, apparently, is a libertarian free markets guy. In an interview with Forbes(http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-12-04/why-dec-4) , he said:

Q: Would you call yourself a free market proponent?

Absolutely. I have mixed attitudes towards capitalism, but I love markets.

From Two Bits by Christopher Kelty:

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Governance and control of the creation and dissemination of knowledge have changed considerably in the context of the Internet over the last thirty years. Nearly all kinds of media are easier to produce, publish, circulate, modify, mash-up, remix, or reuse. The number of such creations, circulations, and borrowings has exploded, and the tools of knowledge creation and circulation—software and networks—have also become more and more pervasively available. The results have also been explosive and include anxieties about validity, quality, ownership and control, moral panics galore, and new concerns about the shape and legitimacy of global “intellectual property” systems. All of these concerns amount to a reorientation of knowledge and power that is incomplete and emergent, and whose implications reach directly into the heart of the legitimacy, certainty, reliability and especially the finality and temporality of the knowledge and infrastructures we collectively create. It is a reorientation at once more specific and more general than the grand diagnostic claims of an “information” or “network” society, or the rise of knowledge work or knowledge-based economies; it is more specific because it concerns precise and detailed technical and legal practices, more general because it is a cultural reorientation, not only an economic or legal one.

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Free Software exemplifies this reorientation; it is not simply a technical pursuit but also the creation of a “public,” a collective that asserts itself as a check on other constituted forms of power—like states, the church, and corporations—but which remains independent of these domains of power.5 Free Software is a response to this reorientation that has resulted in a novel form of democratic political action, a means by which publics can be created and maintained in forms not at all familiar to us from the past. Free Software is a public of a particular kind: a recursive public. Recursive publics are publics concerned with the ability to build, control, modify, and maintain the infrastructure that allows them to come into being in the first place and which, in turn, constitutes their everyday practical commitments and the identities of the participants as creative and autonomous individuals. In the cases explored herein, that specific infrastructure includes the creation of the Internet itself, as well as its associated tools and structures, such as Usenet, e-mail, the World Wide Web (www), UNIX and UNIX-derived operating systems, protocols, standards, and standards processes. For the last thirty years, the Internet has been the subject of a contest in which Free Software has been both a central combatant and an important architect.

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By calling Free Software a recursive public, I am doing two things: first, I am drawing attention to the democratic and political significance of Free Software and the Internet; and second, I am suggesting that our current understanding (both academic and colloquial) of what counts as a self-governing public, or even as “the public,” is radically inadequate to understanding the contemporary reorientation of knowledge and power. The first case is easy to make: it is obvious that there is something political about Free Software, but most casual observers assume, erroneously, that it is simply an ideological stance and that it is anti–intellectual property or technolibertarian. I hope to show how geeks do not start with ideologies, but instead come to them through their involvement in the practices of creating Free Software and its derivatives. To be sure, there are ideologues aplenty, but there are far more people who start out thinking of themselves as libertarians or liberators, but who become something quite different through their participation in Free Software.

!

"#!

The second case is more complex: why another contribution to the debate about the public and public spheres? There are two reasons I have found it necessary to invent, and to attempt to make precise, the concept of a recursive public: the first is to signal the need to include within the spectrum of political activity the creation, modification, and maintenance of software, networks, and legal documents. Coding, hacking, patching, sharing, compiling, and modifying of software are forms of political action that now routinely accompany familiar political forms of expression like free speech, assembly, petition, and a free press. Such activities are expressive in ways that conventional political theory and social science do not recognize: they can both express and “implement” ideas about the social and moral order of society. Software and networks can express ideas in the conventional written sense as well as create (express) infrastructures that allow ideas to circulate in novel and unexpected ways. At an analytic level, the concept of a recursive public is a way of insisting on the importance to public debate of the unruly technical materiality of a political order, not just the embodied discourse (however material) about that order. Throughout this book, I raise the question of how Free Software and the Internet are themselves a public, as well as what that public actually makes, builds, and maintains.

!

"$!

The second reason I use the concept of a recursive public is that conventional publics have been described as “self-grounding,” as constituted only through discourse in the conventional sense of speech, writing, and assembly.6 Recursive publics are “recursive” not only because of the “self-grounding” of commitments and identities but also because they are concerned with the depth or strata of this self-grounding: the layers of technical and legal infrastructure which are necessary for, say, the Internet to exist as the infrastructure of a public. Every act of self-grounding that constitutes a public relies in turn on the existence of a medium or ground through which communication is possible—whether face-to-face speech, epistolary communication, or net-based assembly—and recursive publics relentlessly question the status of these media,

suggesting that they, too, must be independent for a public to be authentic. At each of these layers, technical and legal and organizational decisions can affect whether or not the infrastructure will allow, or even ensure, the continued existence of the recursive publics that are concerned with it. Recursive publics’ independence from power is not absolute; it is provisional and structured in response to the historically constituted layering of power and control within the infrastructures of computing and communication.

!

"#!

For instance, a very important aspect of the contemporary Internet, and one that has been fiercely disputed (recently under the banner of “net neutrality”), is its singularity: there is only one Internet. This was not an inevitable or a technically determined outcome, but the result of a contest in which a series of decisions were made about layers ranging from the very basic physical configuration of the Internet (packet-switched networks and routing systems indifferent to data types), to the standards and protocols that make it work (e.g., TCP/IP or DNS), to the applications that run on it (e-mail, www, ssh). The outcome of these decisions has been to privilege the singularity of the Internet and to champion its standardization, rather than to promote its fragmentation into multiple incompatible networks. These same kinds of decisions are routinely discussed, weighed, and programmed in the activity of various Free Software projects, as well as its derivatives. They are, I claim, decisions embedded in imaginations of order that are simultaneously moral and technical.

!

"$!

By contrast, governments, corporations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and other institutions have plenty of reasons—profit, security, control—to seek to fragment the Internet. But it is the check on this power provided by recursive publics and especially the practices that now make up Free Software that has kept the Internet whole to date. It is a check on power that is by no means absolute, but is nonetheless rigorously and technically concerned with its legitimacy and independence not only from state-based forms of power and control, but from corporate, commercial, and nongovernmental power as well. To the extent that the Internet is public and extensible (including the capability of creating private subnetworks), it is because of the practices discussed herein and their culmination in a recursive public.

!

"%!

Recursive publics respond to governance by directly engaging in, maintaining, and often modifying the infrastructure they seek, as a public, to inhabit and extend—and not only by offering opinions or protesting decisions, as conventional publics do (in most theories of the public sphere). Recursive publics seek to create what might be understood, enigmatically, as a

constantly “self-leveling” level playing field. And it is in the attempt to make the playing field self-leveling that they confront and resist forms of power and control that seek to level it to the advantage of one or another large constituency: state, government, corporation, profession. It is important to understand that geeks do not simply want to level the playing field to their advantage—they have no affinity or identity as such. Instead, they wish to devise ways to give the playing field a certain kind of agency, effected through the agency of many different humans, but checked by its technical and legal structure and openness. Geeks do not wish to compete qua capitalists or entrepreneurs unless they can assure themselves that (qua public actors) that they can compete fairly. It is an ethic of justice shot through with an aesthetic of technical elegance and legal cleverness.

!

"#!

The fact that recursive publics respond in this way—through direct engagement and modification—is a key aspect of the reorientation of power and knowledge that Free Software exemplifies. They are reconstituting the relationship between liberty and knowledge in a technically and historically specific context. Geeks create and modify and argue about licenses and source code and protocols and standards and revision control and ideologies of freedom and pragmatism not simply because these things are inherently or universally important, but because they concern the relationship of governance to the freedom of expression and nature of consent. Source code and copyright licenses, revision control and mailing lists are the pamphlets, coffeehouses, and salons of the twenty-first century: Tischgesellschaften become Schreibtischgesellschaften.7

!

"$!

The “reorientation of power and knowledge” has two key aspects that are part of the concept of recursive publics: availability and modifiability (or adaptability). Availability is a broad, diffuse, and familiar issue. It includes things like transparency, open governance or transparent organization, secrecy and freedom of information, and open access in science. Availability includes the business-school theories of “disintermediation” and “transparency and accountability” and the spread of “audit culture” and so-called neoliberal regimes of governance; it is just as often the subject of suspicion as it is a kind of moral mandate, as in the case of open access to scientific results and publications.8 All of these issues are certainly touched on in detailed and practical ways in the creation of Free Software. Debates about the mode of availability of information made possible in the era of the Internet range from digital-rights management and copy protection, to national security and corporate espionage, to scientific progress and open societies.

!

""!

However, it is modifiability that is the most fascinating, and unnerving, aspect of the reorientation of power and knowledge. Modifiability includes the ability not only to access—that is, to reuse in the trivial sense of using something without restrictions—but to transform it for use in new contexts, to different ends, or in order to participate directly in its improvement and to redistribute or recirculate those improvements within the same infrastructures while securing the same rights for everyone else. In fact, the core practice of Free Software is the practice of reuse and modification of software source code. Reuse and modification are also the key ideas that projects modeled on Free Software (such as Connexions and Creative Commons) see as their goal. Creative Commons has as its motto “Culture always builds on the past,” and they intend that to mean “through legal appropriation and modification.” Connexions, which allows authors to create online bits and pieces of textbooks explicitly encourages authors to reuse work by other people, to modify it, and to make it their own. Modifiability therefore raises a very specific and important question about finality. When is something (software, a film, music, culture) finished? How long does it remain finished? Who decides? Or more generally, what does its temporality look like, and how does that temporality restructure political relationships? Such issues are generally familiar only to historians and literary scholars who understand the transformation of canons, the interplay of imitation and originality, and the theoretical questions raised, for instance, in textual scholarship. But the contemporary meaning of modification includes both a vast increase in the speed and scope of modifiability and a certain automation of the practice that was unfamiliar before the advent of sophisticated, distributed forms of software.

!

"#!

Modifiability is an oft-claimed advantage of Free Software. It can be updated, modified, extended, or changed to deal with other changing environments: new hardware, new operating systems, unforeseen technologies, or new laws and practices. At an infrastructural level, such modifiability makes sense: it is a response to and an alternative to technocratic forms of planning. It is a way of planning in the ability to plan out; an effort to continuously secure the ability to deal with surprise and unexpected outcomes; a way of making flexible, modifiable infrastructures like the Internet as safe as permanent, inflexible ones like roads and bridges.

!

"$!

But what is the cultural significance of modifiability? What does it mean to plan in modifiability to culture, to music, to education and science? At a clerical level, such a question is obvious whenever a scholar cannot recover a document written in WordPerfect 2.0 or on a disk for which there are no longer disk drives, or when a library archive considers saving both the media and the machines that read that media. Modifiability is an imperative for building infrastructures that can last longer. However, it is not only a solution to a clerical problem: it creates new possibilities and new problems for long-settled practices like publication, or the goals and structure of intellectual-property systems, or the definition of the finality, lifetime, monumentality, and especially, the identity of a work. Long-settled, seemingly unassailable practices—like the

authority of published books or the power of governments to control information—are suddenly confounded and denaturalized by the techniques of modifiability.

!

"!

"#!

Over the last ten to fifteen years, as the Internet has spread exponentially and insinuated itself into the most intimate practices of all kinds of people, the issues of availability and modifiability and the reorientation of knowledge and power they signify have become commonplace. As this has happened, the significance and practices associated with Free Software have also spread—and been modulated in the process. These practices provide a material and meaningful starting point for an array of recursive publics who play with, modulate, and transform them as they debate and build new ways to share, create, license, and control their respective productions. They do not all share the same goals, immediate or long-term, but by engaging in the technical, legal, and social practices pioneered in Free Software, they do in fact share a “social imaginary” that defines a particular relationship between technology, organs of governance (whether state, corporate, or nongovernmental), and the Internet. Scientists in a lab or musicians in a band; scholars creating a textbook or social movements contemplating modes of organization and protest; government bureaucrats issuing data or journalists investigating corruption; corporations that manage personal data or co-ops that monitor community development—all these groups and others may find themselves adopting, modulating, rejecting, or refining the practices that have made up Free Software in the recent past and will do so in the near future.

From the Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond:

The Social Context of Open-Source Software

It is truly written: the best hacks start out as personal solutions to the author's everyday problems, and spread because the problem turns out to be typical for a large class of users. This takes us back to the matter of rule 1, restated in a perhaps more useful way:

18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.

So it was with Carl Harris and the ancestral popclient, and so with me and fetchmail. But this has been understood for a long time. The interesting point, the point that the histories of Linux and fetchmail seem to demand we focus on, is the next stage—the evolution of software in the presence of a large and active community of users and co-developers.

In The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks observed that programmer time is not fungible; adding developers to a late software project makes it later. As we've seen previously, he argued that the complexity and communication costs of a project rise with the square of the number of developers, while work done only rises linearly. Brooks's Law has been widely regarded as a truism. But we've examined in this essay an number of ways in which the process of open-source development falsifies the assumptionms behind it—and, empirically, if Brooks's Law were the whole picture Linux would be impossible.

Gerald Weinberg's classic The Psychology of Computer Programming supplied what, in hindsight, we can see as a vital correction to Brooks. In his discussion of ``egoless programming'', Weinberg observed that in shops where developers are not territorial about their code, and encourage other people to look for bugs and potential improvements in it, improvement happens dramatically faster than elsewhere. (Recently, Kent Beck's `extreme programming' technique of deploying coders in pairs looking over one anothers' shoulders might be seen as an attempt to force this effect.)

Weinberg's choice of terminology has perhaps prevented his analysis from gaining the acceptance it deserved—one has to smile at the thought of describing Internet hackers as ``egoless''. But I think his argument looks more compelling today than ever.

The bazaar method, by harnessing the full power of the ``egoless programming'' effect, strongly mitigates the effect of Brooks's Law. The principle behind Brooks's Law is not repealed, but given a large developer population and cheap communications its effects can be swamped by competing nonlinearities that are not otherwise visible. This resembles the relationship between Newtonian and Einsteinian physics—the older system is still valid at low energies, but if you push mass and velocity high enough you get surprises like nuclear explosions or Linux.

The history of Unix should have prepared us for what we're learning from Linux (and what I've verified experimentally on a smaller scale by deliberately copying Linus's methods [EGCS]). That is, while coding remains an essentially solitary activity, the really great hacks come from

harnessing the attention and brainpower of entire communities. The developer who uses only his or her own brain in a closed project is going to fall behind the developer who knows how to create an open, evolutionary context in which feedback exploring the design space, code contributions, bug-spotting, and other improvements come from from hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people.

But the traditional Unix world was prevented from pushing this approach to the ultimate by several factors. One was the legal contraints of various licenses, trade secrets, and commercial interests. Another (in hindsight) was that the Internet wasn't yet good enough.

Before cheap Internet, there were some geographically compact communities where the culture encouraged Weinberg's ``egoless'' programming, and a developer could easily attract a lot of skilled kibitzers and co-developers. Bell Labs, the MIT AI and LCS labs, UC Berkeley—these became the home of innovations that are legendary and still potent.

Linux was the first project for which a conscious and successful effort to use the entire world as its talent pool was made. I don't think it's a coincidence that the gestation period of Linux coincided with the birth of the World Wide Web, and that Linux left its infancy during the same period in 1993–1994 that saw the takeoff of the ISP industry and the explosion of mainstream interest in the Internet. Linus was the first person who learned how to play by the new rules that pervasive Internet access made possible.

While cheap Internet was a necessary condition for the Linux model to evolve, I think it was not by itself a sufficient condition. Another vital factor was the development of a leadership style and set of cooperative customs that could allow developers to attract co-developers and get maximum leverage out of the medium.

But what is this leadership style and what are these customs? They cannot be based on power relationships—and even if they could be, leadership by coercion would not produce the results we see. Weinberg quotes the autobiography of the 19th-century Russian anarchist Pyotr Alexeyvich Kropotkin's Memoirs of a Revolutionist to good effect on this subject:

Having been brought up in a serf-owner's family, I entered active life, like all young men of my time, with a great deal of confidence in the necessity of commanding, ordering, scolding, punishing and the like. But when, at an early stage, I had to manage serious enterprises and to deal with [free] men, and when each mistake would lead at once to heavy consequences, I began to appreciate the difference between acting on the principle of command and discipline and acting on the principle of common understanding. The former works admirably in a military parade, but it is worth nothing where real life is concerned, and the aim can be achieved only through the severe effort of many converging wills.

The ``severe effort of many converging wills'' is precisely what a project like Linux requires—and the ``principle of command'' is effectively impossible to apply among volunteers in the anarchist's paradise we call the Internet. To operate and compete effectively, hackers who want to lead collaborative projects have to learn how to recruit and energize effective communities of

interest in the mode vaguely suggested by Kropotkin's ``principle of understanding''. They must learn to use Linus's Law.[SP]

Earlier I referred to the ``Delphi effect'' as a possible explanation for Linus's Law. But more powerful analogies to adaptive systems in biology and economics also irresistably suggest themselves. The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved. Here, then, is the place to seek the ``principle of understanding''.

The ``utility function'' Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers. (One may call their motivation ``altruistic'', but this ignores the fact that altruism is itself a form of ego satisfaction for the altruist). Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon; one other in which I have long participated is science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom has long explicitly recognized ``egoboo'' (ego-boosting, or the enhancement of one's reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity.

Linus, by successfully positioning himself as the gatekeeper of a project in which the development is mostly done by others, and nurturing interest in the project until it became self-sustaining, has shown an acute grasp of Kropotkin's ``principle of shared understanding''. This quasi-economic view of the Linux world enables us to see how that understanding is applied.

We may view Linus's method as a way to create an efficient market in ``egoboo''—to connect the selfishness of individual hackers as firmly as possible to difficult ends that can only be achieved by sustained cooperation. With the fetchmail project I have shown (albeit on a smaller scale) that his methods can be duplicated with good results. Perhaps I have even done it a bit more consciously and systematically than he.

Many people (especially those who politically distrust free markets) would expect a culture of self-directed egoists to be fragmented, territorial, wasteful, secretive, and hostile. But this expectation is clearly falsified by (to give just one example) the stunning variety, quality, and depth of Linux documentation. It is a hallowed given that programmers hate documenting; how is it, then, that Linux hackers generate so much documentation? Evidently Linux's free market in egoboo works better to produce virtuous, other-directed behavior than the massively-funded documentation shops of commercial software producers.

Both the fetchmail and Linux kernel projects show that by properly rewarding the egos of many other hackers, a strong developer/coordinator can use the Internet to capture the benefits of having lots of co-developers without having a project collapse into a chaotic mess. So to Brooks's Law I counter-propose the following:

19: Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

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The Hacker Manifesto

by+++The Mentor+++

Written January 8, 1986

Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager Arrested in ComputerCrime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...

Damn kids. They're all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a lookbehind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forcesshaped him, what may have molded him?

I am a hacker, enter my world...

Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, thiscrap they teach us bores me...

Damn underachiever. They're all alike.

I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth timehow to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did itin my head..."

Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what Iwant it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't likeme... Or feels threatened by me.. Or thinks I'm a smart ass.. Or doesn't like teachingand shouldn't be here...

Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.

And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line likeheroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found. "This is it... this is where Ibelong..." I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them,may never hear from them again... I know you all...

Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...

You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when wehungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed andtasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few thathad something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water inthe desert.

This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if

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it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and youcall us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist withoutskin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. Youbuild atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to makeus believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people bywhat they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you,something that you will never forgive me for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stopus all... after all, we're all alike.