Title: Two Bits - The Cultural Significance of Free Software Creator: Christopher M. Kelty Rights: © 2008 Duke University Press
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Two Bits is accessible on the Web at twobits.net. Publisher: SiSU ‹<text:a xlink:type='simple' xlink:href='http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu'>http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu</text:a>› (this copy) Date: 2008 Sourcefile: two_bits.christopher_kelty.sst Filetype: graphviz graph text Source digest: SHA256(two_bits.christopher_kelty.sst)= 5431f45312556581a8b44f60a6c8fdedfde73255ed9693c5c4d83efdcb36589a Skin digest: SHA256(skin_2bits.rb)= 6cdcdd2b1fea094cadf62da5f8c79d2b84943ad59d02f2dd2ffd76119d936721 Generated by: Generated by: SiSU 2.8.2 of 2011w10/5 (2011-03-11) Ruby version: ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 72) [i486-linux] Document (dal) last generated: Fri Mar 11 15:33:04 +0100 2011 1 Two Bits - The Cultural Significance of Free Software,
Christopher M. Kelty 2 Dedication 3 To my parents, Anne and Ted 4 Preface 5 This is a book about Free Software, also known as Open Source Software, and is meant for anyone who wants to understand the cultural significance of Free Software. Two Bits explains how Free Software works and how it emerged in tandem with the Internet as both a technical and a social form. Understanding Free Software in detail is the best way to understand many contentious and confusing changes related to the Internet, to "commons," to software, and to networks. Whether you think first of e-mail, Napster, Wikipedia, MySpace, or Flickr; whether you think of the proliferation of databases, identity thieves, and privacy concerns; whether you think of traditional knowledge, patents on genes, the death of scholarly publishing, or compulsory licensing of AIDS medicine; whether you think of MoveOn.org or net neutrality or YouTube—the issues raised by these phenomena can be better understood by looking carefully at the emergence of Free Software. [PAGE x] 6 Why? Because it is in Free Software and its history that the issues raised—from intellectual property and piracy to online political advocacy and "social" software—were first figured out and confronted. Free Software's roots stretch back to the 1970s and crisscross the histories of the personal computer and the Internet, the peaks and troughs of the information-technology and software industries, the transformation of intellectual property law, the innovation of organizations and "virtual" collaboration, and the rise of networked social movements. Free Software does not explain why these various changes have occurred, but rather how individuals and groups are responding: by creating new things, new practices, and new forms of life. It is these practices and forms of life—not the software itself—that are most significant, and they have in turn served as templates that others can use and transform: practices of sharing source code, conceptualizing openness, writing copyright (and copyleft) licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing for all of the above. There are explanations aplenty for why things are the way they are: it's globalization, it's the network society, it's an ideology of transparency, it's the virtualization of work, it's the new flat earth, it's Empire. We are drowning in the why, both popular and scholarly, but starving for the how. 7 Understanding how Free Software works is not just an academic pursuit but an experience that transforms the lives and work of participants involved. Over the last decade, in fieldwork with software programmers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, artists, activists, and other geeks I have repeatedly observed that understanding how Free Software works results in a revelation. People—even (or, perhaps, especially) those who do not consider themselves programmers, hackers, geeks, or technophiles—come out of the experience with something like religion, because Free Software is all about the practices, not about the ideologies and goals that swirl on its surface. Free Software and its creators and users are not, as a group, antimarket or anticommercial; they are not, as a group, anti-intellectual property or antigovernment; they are not, as a group, pro- or anti- anything. In fact, they are not really a group at all: not a corporation or an organization; not an NGO or a government agency; not a professional society or an informal horde of hackers; not a movement or a research project. 8 Free Software is, however, public; it is about making things public. This fact is key to comprehending its cultural significance, its [PAGE xi] appeal, and its proliferation. Free Software is public in a particular way: it is a self-determining, collective, politically independent mode of creating very complex technical objects that are made publicly and freely available to everyone—a "commons," in common parlance. It is a practice of working through the promises of equality, fairness, justice, reason, and argument in a domain of technically complex software and networks, and in a context of powerful, lopsided laws about intellectual property. The fact that something public in this grand sense emerges out of practices so seemingly arcane is why the first urge of many converts is to ask: how can Free Software be "ported" to other aspects of life, such as movies, music, science or medicine, civil society, and education? It is this proselytizing urge and the ease with which the practices are spread that make up the cultural significance of Free Software. For better or for worse, we may all be using Free Software before we know it. 9 Acknowledgements 10 Anthropology is dependent on strangers who become friends and colleagues—strangers who contribute the very essence of the work. In my case, these strangers are also hyperaware of issues of credit, reputation, acknowledgment, reuse, and modification of ideas and things. Therefore, the list is extensive and detailed. 11 Sean Doyle and Adrian Gropper opened the doors to this project, providing unparalleled insight, hospitality, challenge, and curiosity. Axel Roch introduced me to Volker Grassmuck, and to much else. Volker Grassmuck introduced me to Berlin's Free Software world and invited me to participate in the Wizards of OS conferences. Udhay Shankar introduced me to almost everyone I know, sometimes after the fact. Shiv Sastry helped me find lodging in Bangalore at his Aunt Anasuya Sastry's house, which is called "Silicon Valley" and which was truly a lovely place to stay. Bharath Chari and Ram Sundaram let me haunt their office and cat-5 cables [PAGE xiv] during one of the more turbulent periods of their careers. Glenn Otis Brown visited, drank, talked, invited, challenged, entertained, chided, encouraged, drove, was driven, and gave and received advice. Ross Reedstrom welcomed me to the Rice Linux Users' Group and to Connexions. Brent Hendricks did yeoman's work, suffering my questions and intrusions. Geneva Henry, Jenn Drummond, Chuck Bearden, Kathy Fletcher, Manpreet Kaur, Mark Husband, Max Starkenberg, Elvena Mayo, Joey King, and Joel Thierstein have been welcoming and enthusiastic at every meeting. Sid Burris has challenged and respected my work, which has been an honor. Rich Baraniuk listens to everything I say, for better or for worse; he is a magnificent collaborator and friend. 12 James Boyle has been constantly supportive, for what feels like very little return on investment. Very few people get to read and critique and help reshape the argument and structure of a book, and to appear in it as well. Mario Biagioli helped me see the intricate strategy described in chapter 6. Stefan Helmreich read early drafts and transformed my thinking about networks. Manuel DeLanda explained the term assemblage to me. James Faubion corrected my thinking in chapter 2, helped me immeasurably with the Protestants, and has been an exquisitely supportive colleague and department chair. Mazyar Lotfalian and Melissa Cefkin provided their apartment and library, in which I wrote large parts of chapter 1. Matt Price and Michelle Murphy have listened patiently to me construct and reconstruct versions of this book for at least six years. Tom and Elizabeth Landecker provided hospitality and stunningly beautiful surroundings in which to rewrite parts of the book. Lisa Gitelman read carefully and helped explain issues about documentation and versioning that I discuss in chapter 4. Matt Ratto read and commented on chapters 4-7, convinced me to drop a useless distinction, and to clarify the conclusion to chapter 7. Shay David provided strategic insights about openness from his own work and pushed me to explain the point of recursive publics more clearly. Biella Coleman has been a constant interlocutor on the issues in this book—her contributions are too deep, too various, and too thorough to detail. Her own work on Free Software and hackers has been a constant sounding board and guide, and it has been a pleasure to work together on our respective texts. Kim Fortun helped me figure it all out. [PAGE xv] 13 George Marcus hired me into a fantastic anthropology department and has had immense faith in this project throughout its lifetime. Paul Rabinow, Stephen Collier, and Andrew Lakoff have provided an extremely valuable setting—the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory—within which the arguments of this book developed in ways they could not have as a solitary project. Joe Dumit has encouraged and prodded and questioned and brainstormed and guided and inspired. Michael Fischer is the best mentor and advisor ever. He has read everything, has written much that precedes and shapes this work, and has been an unwavering supporter and friend throughout. 14 Tish Stringer, Michael Powell, Valerie Olson, Ala Alazzeh, Lina Dib, Angela Rivas, Anthony Potoczniak, Ayla Samli, Ebru Kayaalp, Michael Kriz, Erkan Saka, Elise McCarthy, Elitza Ranova, Amanda Randall, Kris Peterson, Laura Jones, Nahal Naficy, Andrea Frolic, and Casey O'Donnell make my job rock. Scott McGill, Sarah Ellenzweig, Stephen Collier, Carl Pearson, Dan Wallach, Tracy Volz, Rich Doyle, Ussama Makdisi, Elora Shehabbudin, Michael Morrow, Taryn Kinney, Gregory Kaplan, Jane Greenberg, Hajime Nakatani, Kirsten Ostherr, Henning Schmidgen, Jason Danziger, Kayte Young, Nicholas King, Jennifer Fishman, Paul Drueke, Roberta Bivins, Sherri Roush, Stefan Timmermans, Laura Lark, and Susann Wilkinson either made Houston a wonderful place to be or provided an opportunity to escape it. I am especially happy that Thom Chivens has done both and more. 15 The Center for the Study of Cultures provided me with a Faculty Fellowship in the fall of 2003, which allowed me to accomplish much of the work in conceptualizing the book. The Harvard History of Science Department and the MIT Program in History, Anthropology, and Social Studies of Science and Technology hosted me in the spring of 2005, allowing me to write most of chapters 7, 8, and 9. Rice University has been extremely generous in all respects, and a wonderful place to work. I'm most grateful for a junior sabbatical that gave me the chance to complete much of this book. John Hoffman graciously and generously allowed the use of the domain name twobits.net, in support of Free Software. Ken Wissoker, Courtney Berger, and the anonymous reviewers for Duke University Press have made this a much, much better book than when I started. [PAGE xvi] 16 My parents, Ted and Anne, and my brother, Kevin, have always been supportive and loving; though they claim to have no idea what I do, I nonetheless owe my small success to their constant support. Hannah Landecker has read and reread and rewritten every part of this work; she has made it and me better, and I love her dearly for it. Last, but not least, my new project, Ida Jane Kelty Landecker, is much cuter and smarter and funnier than Two Bits, and I love her for distracting me from it. 17 Introduction 18 Introduction 19 Around 1998 Free Software emerged from a happily subterranean and obscure existence stretching back roughly twenty years. At the very pinnacle of the dotcom boom, Free Software suddenly populated the pages of mainstream business journals, entered the strategy and planning discussions of executives, confounded the radar of political leaders and regulators around the globe, and permeated the consciousness of a generation of technophile teenagers growing up in the 1990s wondering how people ever lived without e-mail. Free Software appeared to be something shocking, something that economic history suggested could never exist: a practice of creating software—good software—that was privately owned, but freely and publicly accessible. Free Software, as its ambiguous moniker suggests, is both free from constraints and free of charge. Such characteristics seem to violate economic logic and the principles of private ownership and individual autonomy, yet there are tens of [pg 2] millions of people creating this software and hundreds of millions more using it. Why? Why now? And most important: how? 20 Free Software is a set of practices for the distributed collaborative creation of software source code that is then made openly and freely available through a clever, unconventional use of copyright law.1 But it is much more: Free Software exemplifies a considerable reorientation of knowledge and power in contemporary society—a reorientation of power with respect to the creation, dissemination, and authorization of knowledge in the era of the Internet. This book is about the cultural significance of Free Software, and by cultural I mean much more than the exotic behavioral or sartorial traits of software programmers, fascinating though they be. By culture, I mean an ongoing experimental system, a space of modification and modulation, of figuring out and testing; culture is an experiment that is hard to keep an eye on, one that changes quickly and sometimes starkly. Culture as an experimental system crosses economies and governments, networked social spheres, and the infrastructure of knowledge and power within which our world functions today—or fails to. Free Software, as a cultural practice, weaves together a surprising range of places, objects, and people; it contains patterns, thresholds, and repetitions that are not simple or immediately obvious, either to the geeks who make Free Software or to those who want to understand it. It is my goal in this book to reveal some of those complex patterns and thresholds, both historically and anthropologically, and to explain not just what Free Software is but also how it has emerged in the recent past and will continue to change in the near future.2 1 A Note on Terminology: There is still debate about how to refer to Free Software, which is also known as Open Source Software. The scholarly community has adopted either FOSS or FLOSS (or F/LOSS): the former stands for the Anglo-American Free and Open Source Software; the latter stands for the continental Free, Libre and Open Source Software. Two Bits sticks to the simple term Free Software to refer to all of these things, except where it is specifically necessary to differentiate two or more names, or to specify people or events so named. The reason is primarily aesthetic and political, but Free Software is also the older term, as well as the one that includes issues of moral and social order. I explain in chapter 3 why there are two terms. 2 2 Michael M. J. Fischer, "Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems." 21 The significance of Free Software extends far beyond the arcane and detailed technical practices of software programmers and "geeks" (as I refer to them herein). Since about 1998, the practices and ideas of Free Software have extended into new realms of life and creativity: from software to music and film to science, engineering, and education; from national politics of intellectual property to global debates about civil society; from UNIX to Mac OS X and Windows; from medical records and databases to international disease monitoring and synthetic biology; from Open Source to open access. Free Software is no longer only about software—it exemplifies a more general reorientation of power and knowledge. 22 The terms Free Software and Open Source don't quite capture the extent of this reorientation or their own cultural significance. They [pg 3] refer, quite narrowly, to the practice of creating software—an activity many people consider to be quite far from their experience. However, creating Free Software is more than that: it includes a unique combination of more familiar practices that range from creating and policing intellectual property to arguing about the meaning of "openness" to organizing and coordinating people and machines across locales and time zones. Taken together, these practices make Free Software distinct, significant, and meaningful both to those who create it and to those who take the time to understand how it comes into being. 23 In order to analyze and illustrate the more general cultural significance of Free Software and its consequences, I introduce the concept of a "recursive public." A recursive public is a public that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives. Free Software is one instance of this concept, both as it has emerged in the recent past and as it undergoes transformation and differentiation in the near future. There are other instances, including those that emerge from the practices of Free Software, such as Creative Commons, the Connexions project, and the Open Access movement in science. These latter instances may or may not be Free Software, or even "software" projects per se, but they are connected through the same practices, and what makes them significant is that they may also be "recursive publics" in the sense I explore in this book. Recursive publics, and publics generally, differ from interest groups, corporations, unions, professions, churches, and other forms of organization because of their focus on the radical technological modifiability of their own terms of existence. In any public there inevitably arises a moment when the question of how things are said, who controls the means of communication, or whether each and everyone is being properly heard becomes an issue. A legitimate public sphere is one that gives outsiders a way in: they may or may not be heard, but they do not have to appeal to any authority (inside or outside the organization) in order to have a voice.3 Such publics are not inherently modifiable, but are made so—and maintained—through the practices of participants. It is possible for Free Software as we know it to cease to be public, or to become just one more settled [pg 4] form of power, but my focus is on the recent past and near future of something that is (for the time being) public in a radical and novel way. 3 So, for instance, when a professional society founded on charters and ideals for membership and qualification speaks as a public, it represents its members, as when the American Medical Association argues for or against changes to Medicare. However, if a new group—say, of nurses—seeks not only to participate in this discussion—which may be possible, even welcomed—but to change the structure of representation in order to give themselves status equal to doctors, this change is impossible, for it goes against the very aims and principles of the society. Indeed, the nurses will be urged to form their own society, not to join that of the doctors, a proposition which gives the lie to the existing structures of power. By contrast, a public is an entity that is less controlled and hence more agonistic, such that nurses might join, speak, and insist on changing the terms of debate, just as patients, scientists, or homeless people might. Their success, however, depends entirely on the force with which their actions transform the focus and terms of the public. Concepts of the public sphere have been roundly critiqued in the last twenty years for presuming that such "equality of access" is sufficient to achieve representation, when in fact other contextual factors (race, class, sex) inherently weight the representative power of different participants. But these are two different and overlapping problems: one cannot solve the problem of pernicious, invisible forms of inequality unless one first solves the problem of ensuring a certain kind of structural publicity. It is precisely the focus on maintaining publicity for a recursive public, over against massive and powerful corporate and governmental attempts to restrict it, that I locate as the central struggle of Free Software. Gender certainly influences who gets heard within Free Software, for example, but it is a mistake to focus on this inequality at the expense of the larger, more threatening form of political failure that Free Software addresses. And I think there are plenty of geeks—man, woman and animal—who share this sentiment. 24 The concept of a recursive public is not meant to apply to any and every instance of a public—it is not a replacement for the concept of a "public sphere"—but is intended rather to give readers a specific and detailed sense of the non-obvious, but persistent threads that form the warp and weft of Free Software and to analyze similar and related projects that continue to emerge from it as novel and unprecedented forms of publicity and political action. 25 At first glance, the thread tying these projects together seems to be the Internet. And indeed, the history and cultural significance of Free Software has been intricately mixed up with that of the Internet over the last thirty years. The Internet is a unique platform—an environment or an infrastructure—for Free Software. But the Internet looks the way it does because of Free Software. Free Software and the Internet are related like figure and ground or like system and environment; neither are stable or unchanging in and of themselves, and there are a number of practical, technical, and historical places where the two are essentially indistinguishable. The Internet is not itself a recursive public, but it is something vitally important to that public, something about which such publics care deeply and act to preserve. Throughout this book, I will return to these three phenomena: the Internet, a heterogeneous and diverse, though singular, infrastructure of technologies and uses; Free Software, a very specific set of technical, legal, and social practices that now require the Internet; and recursive publics, an analytic concept intended to clarify the relation of the first two. 26 Both the Internet and Free Software are historically specific, that is, not just any old new media or information technology. But the Internet is many, many specific things to many, many specific people. As one reviewer of an early manuscript version of this book noted, "For most people, the Internet is porn, stock quotes, Al Jazeera clips of executions, Skype, seeing pictures of the grandkids, porn, never having to buy another encyclopedia, MySpace, e-mail, online housing listings, Amazon, Googling potential romantic interests, etc. etc." It is impossible to explain all of these things; the meaning and significance of the proliferation of digital pornography is a very different concern than that of the fall of the print encyclopedia [pg 5] and the rise of Wikipedia. Yet certain underlying practices relate these diverse phenomena to one another and help explain why they have occurred at this time and in this technical, legal, and social context. By looking carefully at Free Software and its modulations, I suggest, one can come to a better understanding of the changes affecting pornography, Wikipedia, stock quotes, and many other wonderful and terrifying things.4 4 Wikipedia is perhaps the most widely known and generally familiar example of what this book is about. Even though it is not identified as such, it is in fact a Free Software project and a "modulation" of Free Software as I describe it here. The non-technically inclined reader might keep Wikipedia in mind as an example with which to follow the argument of this book. I will return to it explicitly in part 3. However, for better or for worse, there will be no discussion of pornography. 27 Two Bits has three parts. Part I of this book introduces the reader to the concept of recursive publics by exploring the lives, works, and discussions of an international community of geeks brought together by their shared interest in the Internet. Chapter 1 asks, in an ethnographic voice, "Why do geeks associate with one another?" The answer—told via the story of Napster in 2000 and the standards process at the heart of the Internet—is that they are making a recursive public. Chapter 2 explores the words and attitudes of geeks more closely, focusing on the strange stories they tell (about the Protestant Reformation, about their practical everyday polymathy, about progress and enlightenment), stories that make sense of contemporary political economy in sometimes surprising ways. Central to part I is an explication of the ways in which geeks argue about technology but also argue with and through it, by building, modifying, and maintaining the very software, networks, and legal tools within which and by which they associate with one another. It is meant to give the reader a kind of visceral sense of why certain arrangements of technology, organization, and law—specifically that of the Internet and Free Software—are so vitally important to these geeks. 28 Part II takes a step back from ethnographic engagement to ask, "What is Free Software and why has it emerged at this point in history?" Part II is a historically detailed portrait of the emergence of Free Software beginning in 1998-99 and stretching back in time as far as the late 1950s; it recapitulates part I by examining Free Software as an exemplar of a recursive public. The five chapters in part II tell a coherent historical story, but each is focused on a separate component of Free Software. The stories in these chapters help distinguish the figure of Free Software from the ground of the Internet. The diversity of technical practices, economic concerns, information technologies, and legal and organizational practices is huge, and these five chapters distinguish and describe the specific practices in their historical contexts and settings: practices of [pg 6] proselytizing and arguing, of sharing, porting, and forking source code, of conceptualizing openness and open systems, of creating Free Software copyright, and of coordinating people and source code. 29 Part III returns to ethnographic engagement, analyzing two related projects inspired by Free Software which modulate one or more of the five components discussed in part II, that is, which take the practices as developed in Free Software and experiment with making something new and different. The two projects are Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to develop an online scholarly textbook commons. By tracing the modulations of practices in detail, I ask, "Are these projects still Free Software?" and "Are these projects still recursive publics?" The answer to the first questions reveals how Free Software's flexible practices are influencing specific forms of practice far from software programming, while the answer to the second question helps explain how Free Software, Creative Commons, Connexions, and projects like them are all related, strategic responses to the reorientation of power and knowledge. The conclusion raises a series of questions intended to help scholars looking at related phenomena. 30 Recursive Publics and the Reorientation of Power and Knowledge 31 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 [pg 7] 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. 32 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. 5 Although the term public clearly suggests private as its opposite, Free Software is not anticommercial. A very large amount of money, both real and notional, is involved in the creation of Free Software. The term recursive [PAGE 313] market could also be used, in order to emphasize the importance (especially during the 1990s) of the economic features of the practice. The point is not to test whether Free Software is a "public" or a "market," but to construct a concept adequate to the practices that constitute it. 33 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 [pg 8] 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. 34 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. 35 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 [pg 9] 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. 6 See, for example, Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 67-74. 36 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. 37 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. 38 Recursive publics respond to governance by directly engaging in, maintaining, and often modifying the infrastructure they seek, as a [pg 10] 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. 39 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 7 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, esp. 27-43. 40 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 [pg 11] 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. 8 Critiques of the demand for availability and the putatively inherent superiority of transparency include Coombe and Herman, "Rhetorical Virtues" and "Your Second Life?"; Christen, "Gone Digital"; and Anderson and Bowery, "The Imaginary Politics of Access to Knowledge." 41 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. 42 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 [pg 12] 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. 43 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. 44 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 [pg 13] 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. 45 Experiment and Modulation 46 What exactly is Free Software? This question is, perhaps surprisingly, an incredibly common one in geek life. Debates about definition and discussions and denunciations are ubiquitous. As an anthropologist, I have routinely participated in such discussions and debates, and it is through my immediate participation that Two Bits opens. In part I I tell stories about geeks, stories that are meant to give the reader that classic anthropological sense of being thrown into another world. The stories reveal several general aspects of what geeks talk about and how they do so, without getting into what Free Software is in detail. I start in this way because my project started this way. I did not initially intend to study Free Software, but it was impossible to ignore its emergence and manifest centrality to geeks. The debates about the definition of Free Software that I participated in online and in the field eventually led me away from studying geeks per se and turned me toward the central research concern of this book: what is the cultural significance of Free Software? 47 In part II what I offer is not a definition of Free Software, but a history of how it came to be. The story begins in 1998, with an important announcement by Netscape that it would give away the source code to its main product, Netscape Navigator, and works backward from this announcement into the stories of the UNIX operating system, "open systems," copyright law, the Internet, and tools for coordinating people and code. Together, these five stories constitute a description of how Free Software works as a practice. As a cultural analysis, these stories highlight just how experimental the practices are, and how individuals keep track of and modulate the practices along the way. 48 Netscape's decision came at an important point in the life of Free Software. It was at just this moment that Free Software was becoming aware of itself as a coherent movement and not just a diverse amalgamation of projects, tools, or practices. Ironically, this [pg 14] recognition also betokened a split: certain parties started to insist that the movement be called "Open Source" software instead, to highlight the practical over the ideological commitments of the movement. The proposal itself unleashed an enormous public discussion about what defined Free Software (or Open Source). This enigmatic event, in which a movement became aware of itself at the same time that it began to question its mission, is the subject of chapter 3. I use the term movement to designate one of the five core components of Free Software: the practices of argument and disagreement about the meaning of Free Software. Through these practices of discussion and critique, the other four practices start to come into relief, and participants in both Free Software and Open Source come to realize something surprising: for all the ideological distinctions at the level of discourse, they are doing exactly the same thing at the level of practice. The affect-laden histrionics with which geeks argue about the definition of what makes Free Software free or Open Source open can be matched only by the sober specificity of the detailed practices they share. 49 The second component of Free Software is just such a mundane activity: sharing source code (chapter 4). It is an essential and fundamentally routine practice, but one with a history that reveals the goals of software portability, the interactions of commercial and academic software development, and the centrality of source code (and not only of abstract concepts) in pedagogical settings. The details of "sharing" source code also form the story of the rise and proliferation of the UNIX operating system and its myriad derivatives. 50 The third component, conceptualizing openness (chapter 5), is about the specific technical and "moral" meanings of openness, especially as it emerged in the 1980s in the computer industry's debates over "open systems." These debates concerned the creation of a particular infrastructure, including both technical standards and protocols (a standard UNIX and protocols for networks), and an ideal market infrastructure that would allow open systems to flourish. Chapter 5 is the story of the failure to achieve a market infrastructure for open systems, in part due to a significant blind spot: the role of intellectual property. 51 The fourth component, applying copyright (and copyleft) licenses (chapter 6), involves the problem of intellectual property as it faced programmers and geeks in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this [pg 15] chapter I detail the story of the first Free Software license—the GNU General Public License (GPL)—which emerged out of a controversy around a very famous piece of software called EMACS. The controversy is coincident with changing laws (in 1976 and 1980) and changing practices in the software industry—a general drift from trade secret to copyright protection—and it is also a story about the vaunted "hacker ethic" that reveals it in its native practical setting, rather than as a rarefied list of rules. 52 The fifth component, the practice of coordination and collaboration (chapter 7), is the most talked about: the idea of tens or hundreds of thousands of people volunteering their time to contribute to the creation of complex software. In this chapter I show how novel forms of coordination developed in the 1990s and how they worked in the canonical cases of Apache and Linux; I also highlight how coordination facilitates the commitment to adaptability (or modifiability) over against planning and hierarchy, and how this commitment resolves the tension between individual virtuosity and the need for collective control. 53 Taken together, these five components make up Free Software—but they are not a definition. Within each of these five practices, many similar and dissimilar activities might reasonably be included. The point of such a redescription of the practices of Free Software is to conceptualize them as a kind of collective technical experimental system. Within each component are a range of differences in practice, from conventional to experimental. At the center, so to speak, are the most common and accepted versions of a practice; at the edges are more unusual or controversial versions. Together, the components make up an experimental system whose infrastructure is the Internet and whose "hypotheses" concern the reorientation of knowledge and power. 54 For example, one can hardly have Free Software without source code, but it need not be written in C (though the vast majority of it is); it can be written in Java or perl or TeX. However, if one stretches the meaning of source code to include music (sheet music as source and performance as binary), what happens? Is this still Free Software? What happens when both the sheet and the performance are "born digital"? Or, to take a different example, Free Software requires Free Software licenses, but the terms of these licenses are often changed and often heatedly discussed and vigilantly policed by geeks. What degree of change removes a license [pg 16] from the realm of Free Software and why? How much flexibility is allowed? 55 Conceived this way, Free Software is a system of thresholds, not of classification; the excitement that participants and observers sense comes from the modulation (experimentation) of each of these practices and the subsequent discovery of where the thresholds are. Many, many people have written their own "Free Software" copyright licenses, but only some of them remain within the threshold of the practice as defined by the system. Modulations happen whenever someone learns how some component of Free Software works and asks, "Can I try these practices out in some other domain?" 56 The reality of constant modulation means that these five practices do not define Free Software once and for all; they define it with respect to its constitution in the contemporary. It is a set of practices defined "around the point" 1998-99, an intensive coordinate space that allows one to explore Free Software's components prospectively and retrospectively: into the near future and the recent past. Free Software is a machine for charting the (re)emergence of a problematic of power and knowledge as it is filtered through the technical realities of the Internet and the political and economic configuration of the contemporary. Each of these practices has its own temporality of development and emergence, but they have recently come together into this full house called either Free Software or Open Source.9 9 This description of Free Software could also be called an "assemblage." The most recent source for this is Rabinow, Anthropos Today. The language of thresholds and intensities is most clearly developed by Manuel DeLanda in A Thousand Years of Non-linear History and in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. The term problematization, from Rabinow (which he channels from Foucault), is a synonym for the phrase "reorientation of knowledge and power" as I use it here. 57 Viewing Free Software as an experimental system has a strategic purpose in Two Bits. It sets the stage for part III, wherein I ask what kinds of modulations might no longer qualify as Free Software per se, but still qualify as recursive publics. It was around 2000 that talk of "commons" began to percolate out of discussions about Free Software: commons in educational materials, commons in biodiversity materials, commons in music, text, and video, commons in medical data, commons in scientific results and data.10 On the one hand, it was continuous with interest in creating "digital archives" or "online collections" or "digital libraries"; on the other hand, it was a conjugation of the digital collection with the problems and practices of intellectual property. The very term commons—at once a new name and a theoretical object of investigation—was meant to suggest something more than simply a collection, whether of [pg 17] digital objects or anything else; it was meant to signal the public interest, collective management, and legal status of the collection.11 10 See Kelty, "Culture's Open Sources." 11 The genealogy of the term commons has a number of sources. An obvious source is Garrett Hardin's famous 1968 article "The Tragedy of the Commons." James Boyle has done more than anyone to specify the term, especially during a 2001 conference on the public domain, which included the inspired guest-list juxtaposition of the appropriation-happy musical collective Negativland and the dame of "commons" studies, Elinor Ostrom, whose book Governing the Commons has served as a certain inspiration for thinking about commons versus public domains. Boyle, for his part, has ceaselessly pushed the "environmental" metaphor of speaking for the public domain as environmentalists of the 1960s and 1970s spoke for the environment (see Boyle, "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain" and "A Politics of Intellectual Property"). The term commons is useful in this context precisely because it distinguishes the "public domain" as an imagined object of pure public transaction and coordination, as opposed to a "commons," which can consist of privately owned things/spaces that are managed in such a fashion that they effectively function like a "public domain" is imagined to (see Boyle, "The Public Domain"; Hess and Ostrom, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons). 58 In part III, I look in detail at two "commons" understood as modulations of the component practices of Free Software. Rather than treating commons projects simply as metaphorical or inspirational uses of Free Software, I treat them as modulations, which allows me to remain directly connected to the changing practices involved. The goal of part III is to understand how commons projects like Connexions and Creative Commons breach the thresholds of these practices and yet maintain something of the same orientation. What changes, for instance, have made it possible to imagine new forms of free content, free culture, open source music, or a science commons? What happens as new communities of people adopt and modulate the five component practices? Do they also become recursive publics, concerned with the maintenance and expansion of the infrastructures that allow them to come into being in the first place? Are they concerned with the implications of availability and modifiability that continue to unfold, continue to be figured out, in the realms of education, music, film, science, and writing? 59 The answers in part III make clear that, so far, these concerns are alive and well in the modulations of Free Software: Creative Commons and Connexions each struggle to come to terms with new ways of creating, sharing, and reusing content in the contemporary legal environment, with the Internet as infrastructure. Chapters 8 and 9 provide a detailed analysis of a technical and legal experiment: a modulation that begins with source code, but quickly requires modulations in licensing arrangements and forms of coordination. It is here that Two Bits provides the most detailed story of figuring out set against the background of the reorientation of knowledge and power. This story is, in particular, one of reuse, of modifiability and the problems that emerge in the attempt to build it into the everyday practices of pedagogical writing and cultural production of myriad forms. Doing so leads the actors involved directly to the question of the existence and ontology of norms: norms of scholarly production, borrowing, reuse, citation, reputation, and ownership. These last chapters open up questions about the stability of modern knowledge, not as an archival or a legal problem, but as a social and normative one; they raise questions about the invention and control of norms, and the forms of life that may emerge from these [pg 18] practices. Recursive publics come to exist where it is clear that such invention and control need to be widely shared, openly examined, and carefully monitored. 60 Three Ways of Looking at Two Bits 61 Two Bits makes three kinds of scholarly contributions: empirical, methodological, and theoretical. Because it is based largely on fieldwork (which includes historical and archival work), these three contributions are often mixed up with each other. Fieldwork, especially in cultural and social anthropology in the last thirty years, has come to be understood less and less as one particular tool in a methodological toolbox, and more and more as distinctive mode of epistemological encounter.12 The questions I began with emerged out of science and technology studies, but they might end up making sense to a variety of fields, ranging from legal studies to computer science. 12 Marcus and Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique; Marcus and Clifford, Writing Culture; Fischer, Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice; Marcus, Ethnography through Thick and Thin; Rabinow, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason and Anthropos Today. 62 Empirically speaking, the actors in my stories are figuring something out, something unfamiliar, troubling, imprecise, and occasionally shocking to everyone involved at different times and to differing extents.13 There are two kinds of figuring-out stories: the contemporary ones in which I have been an active participant (those of Connexions and Creative Commons), and the historical ones conducted through "archival" research and rereading of certain kinds of texts, discussions, and analyses-at-the-time (those of UNIX, EMACS, Linux, Apache, and Open Systems). Some are stories of technical figuring out, but most are stories of figuring out a problem that appears to have emerged. Some of these stories involve callow and earnest actors, some involve scheming and strategy, but in all of them the figuring out is presented "in the making" and not as something that can be conveniently narrated as obvious and uncontested with the benefit of hindsight. Throughout this book, I tell stories that illustrate what geeks are like in some respects, but, more important, that show them in the midst of figuring things out—a practice that can happen both in discussion and in the course of designing, planning, executing, writing, debugging, hacking, and fixing. 13 The language of "figuring out" has its immediate source in the work of Kim Fortun, "Figuring Out Ethnography." Fortun's work refines two other sources, the work of Bruno Latour in Science in Action and that of Hans-Jorg Rheinberger in Towards History of Epistemic Things. Latour describes the difference between "science made" and "science in the making" and how the careful analysis of new objects can reveal how they come to be. Rheinberger extends this approach through analysis of the detailed practices involved in figuring out a new object or a new process—practices which participants cannot quite name or explain in precise terms until after the fact. 63 There are also myriad ways in which geeks narrate their own actions to themselves and others, as they figure things out. Indeed, [pg 19] there is no crisis of representing the other here: geeks are vocal, loud, persistent, and loquacious. The superalterns can speak for themselves. However, such representations should not necessarily be taken as evidence that geeks provide adequate analytic or critical explanations of their own actions. Some of the available writing provides excellent description, but distracting analysis. Eric Raymond's work is an example of such a combination.14 Over the course of my fieldwork, Raymond's work has always been present as an excellent guide to the practices and questions that plague geeks—much like a classic "principal informant" in anthropology. And yet his analyses, which many geeks subscribe to, are distracting. They are fanciful, occasionally enjoyable and enlightening—but they are not about the cultural significance of Free Software. As such I am less interested in treating geeks as natives to be explained and more interested in arguing with them: the people in Two Bits are a sine qua non of the ethnography, but they are not the objects of its analysis.15 14 Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. 15 The literature on "virtual communities," "online communities," the culture of hackers and geeks, or the social study of information technology offers important background information, although it is not the subject of this book. A comprehensive review of work in anthropology and related disciplines is Wilson and Peterson, "The Anthropology of Online Communities." Other touchstones are Miller and Slater, The Internet; Carla Freeman, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy; Hine, Virtual Ethnography; Kling, Computerization and Controversy; Star, The Cultures of Computing; Castells, The Rise of the Network Society; Boczkowski, Digitizing the News. Most social-science work in information technology has dealt with questions of inequality and the so-called digital divide, an excellent overview being DiMaggio et al., "From Unequal Access to Differentiated Use." Beyond works in anthropology and science studies, a number of works from various other disciplines have recently taken up similar themes, especially Adrian MacKenzie, Cutting Code; Galloway, Protocol; Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom; and Liu, Laws of Cool. By contrast, if social-science studies of information technology are set against a background of historical and ethnographic studies of "figuring out" problems of specific information technologies, software, or networks, then the literature is sparse. Examples of anthropology and science studies of figuring out include Barry, Political Machines; Hayden, When Nature Goes Public; and Fortun, Advocating Bhopal. Matt Ratto has also portrayed this activity in Free Software in his dissertation, "The Pressure of Openness." 64 Because the stories I tell here are in fact recent by the standards of historical scholarship, there is not much by way of comparison in terms of the empirical material. I rely on a number of books and articles on the history of the early Internet, especially Janet Abbate's scholarship and the single historical work on UNIX, Peter Salus's A Quarter Century of Unix.16 There are also a couple of excellent journalistic works, such as Glyn Moody's Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution (which, like Two Bits, relies heavily on the novel accessibility of detailed discussions carried out on public mailing lists). Similarly, the scholarship on Free Software and its history is just starting to establish itself around a coherent set of questions.17 16 In addition to Abbate and Salus, see Norberg and O'Neill, Transforming Computer Technology; Naughton, A Brief History of the Future; Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late; Waldrop, The Dream Machine; Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1. For a classic autodocumentation of one aspect of the Internet, see Hauben and Hauben, Netizens. 17 Kelty, "Culture's Open Sources"; Coleman, "The Social Construction of Freedom"; Ratto, "The Pressure of Openness"; Joseph Feller et al., Perspectives [pg 315] on Free and Open Source Software; see also <http://freesoftware.mit.edu/>, organized by Karim Lakhani, which is a large collection of work on Free Software projects. Early work in this area derived both from the writings of practitioners such as Raymond and from business and management scholars who noticed in Free Software a remarkable, surprising set of seeming contradictions. The best of these works to date is Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source. Weber's conclusions are similar to those presented here, and he has a kind of cryptoethnographic familiarity (that he does not explicitly avow) with the actors and practices. Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks extends and generalizes some of Weber's argument. 65 Methodologically, Two Bits provides an example of how to study distributed phenomena ethnographically. Free Software and the Internet are objects that do not have a single geographic site at which they can be studied. Hence, this work is multisited in the simple sense of having multiple sites at which these objects were investigated: Boston, Bangalore, Berlin, Houston. It was conducted among particular people, projects, and companies and at conferences and online gatherings too numerous to list, but it has not been a study of a single Free Software project distributed around the globe. In all of these places and projects the geeks I worked with were randomly and loosely affiliated people with diverse lives and histories. Some [pg 20] identified as Free Software hackers, but most did not. Some had never met each other in real life, and some had. They represented multiple corporations and institutions, and came from diverse nations, but they nonetheless shared a certain set of ideas and idioms that made it possible for me to travel from Boston to Berlin to Bangalore and pick up an ongoing conversation with different people, in very different places, without missing a beat. 66 The study of distributed phenomena does not necessarily imply the detailed, local study of each instance of a phenomenon, nor does it necessitate visiting every relevant geographical site—indeed, such a project is not only extremely difficult, but confuses map and territory. As Max Weber put it, "It is not the ‘ actual' inter-connection of ‘ things' but the conceptual inter-connection of problems that define the scope of the various sciences."18 The decisions about where to go, whom to study, and how to think about Free Software are arbitrary in the precise sense that because the phenomena are so widely distributed, it is possible to make any given node into a source of rich and detailed knowledge about the distributed phenomena itself, not only about the local site. Thus, for instance, the Connexions project would probably have remained largely unknown to me had I not taken a job in Houston, but it nevertheless possesses precise, identifiable connections to the other sites and sets of people that I have studied, and is therefore recognizable as part of this distributed phenomena, rather than some other. I was actively looking for something like Connexions in order to ask questions about what was becoming of Free Software and how it was transforming. Had there been no Connexions in my back yard, another similar field site would have served instead. 18 Max Weber, "Objectivity in the Social Sciences and Social Policy," 68. 67 It is in this sense that the ethnographic object of this study is not geeks and not any particular project or place or set of people, but Free Software and the Internet. Even more precisely, the ethnographic object of this study is "recursive publics"—except that this concept is also the work of the ethnography, not its preliminary object. I could not have identified "recursive publics" as the object of the ethnography at the outset, and this is nice proof that ethnographic work is a particular kind of epistemological encounter, an encounter that requires considerable conceptual work during and after the material labor of fieldwork, and throughout the material labor of writing and rewriting, in order to make sense of and reorient it into a question that will have looked deliberate and [pg 21] answerable in hindsight. Ethnography of this sort requires a long-term commitment and an ability to see past the obvious surface of rapid transformation to a more obscure and slower temporality of cultural significance, yet still pose questions and refine debates about the near future.19 Historically speaking, the chapters of part II can be understood as a contribution to a history of scientific infrastructure—or perhaps to an understanding of large-scale, collective experimentation.20 The Internet and Free Software are each an important practical transformation that will have effects on the practice of science and a kind of complex technical practice for which there are few existing models of study. 19 Despite what might sound like a "shoot first, ask questions later" approach, the design of this project was in fact conducted according to specific methodologies. The most salient is actor-network theory: Latour, Science in Action; Law, "Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering"; Callon, "Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation"; Latour, Pandora's Hope; Latour, Re-assembling the Social; Callon, Laws of the Markets; Law and Hassard, Actor Network Theory and After. Ironically, there have been no actor-network studies of networks, which is to say, of particular information and communication technologies such as the Internet. The confusion of the word network (as an analytical and methodological term) with that of network (as a particular configuration of wires, waves, software, and chips, or of people, roads, and buses, or of databases, names, and diseases) means that it is necessary to always distinguish this-network-here from any-network-whatsoever. My approach shares much with the ontological questions raised in works such as Law, Aircraft Stories; Mol, The Body Multiple; Cussins, "Ontological Choreography"; Charis Thompson, Making Parents; and Dumit, Picturing Personhood. 20 I understand a concern with scientific infrastructure to begin with Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer in Leviathan and the Air Pump, but the genealogy is no doubt more complex. It includes Shapin, The Social History of Truth; Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier; Galison, How Experiments End and Image and Logic; Daston, Biographies of Scientific Objects; Johns, The Nature of the Book. A whole range of works explore the issue of scientific tools and infrastructure: Kohler, Lords of the Fly; Rheinberger, Towards a History of Epistemic Things; Landecker, Culturing Life; Keating and Cambrosio, Biomedical Platforms. Bruno Latour's "What Rules of Method for the New Socio-scientific Experiments" provides one example of where science studies might go with these questions. Important texts on the subject of technical infrastructures include Walsh and Bayma, "Computer Networks and Scientific Work"; Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out; Edwards, The [pg 316] Closed World; Misa, Brey, and Feenberg, Modernity and Technology; Star and Ruhleder, "Steps Towards an Ecology of Infrastructure." 68 A methodological note about the peculiarity of my subject is also in order. The Attentive Reader will note that there are very few fragments of conventional ethnographic material (i.e., interviews or notes) transcribed herein. Where they do appear, they tend to be "publicly available"—which is to say, accessible via the Internet—and are cited as such, with as much detail as necessary to allow the reader to recover them. Conventional wisdom in both anthropology and history has it that what makes a study interesting, in part, is the work a researcher has put into gathering that which is not already available, that is, primary sources as opposed to secondary sources. In some cases I provide that primary access (specifically in chapters 2, 8, and 9), but in many others it is now literally impossible: nearly everything is archived. Discussions, fights, collaborations, talks, papers, software, articles, news stories, history, old software, old software manuals, reminiscences, notes, and drawings—it is all saved by someone, somewhere, and, more important, often made instantly available by those who collect it. The range of conversations and interactions that count as private (either in the sense of disappearing from written memory or of being accessible only to the parties involved) has shrunk demonstrably since about 1981. 69 Such obsessive archiving means that ethnographic research is stratified in time. Questions that would otherwise have required "being there" are much easier to research after the fact, and this is most evident in my reconstruction from sources on USENET and mailing lists in chapters 1, 6, and 7. The overwhelming availability of quasi-archival materials is something I refer to, in a play on the EMACS text editor, as "self-documenting history." That is to say, one of the activities that geeks love to participate in, and encourage, is the creation, analysis, and archiving of their own roles in the [pg 22] development of the Internet. No matter how obscure or arcane, it seems most geeks have a well-developed sense of possibility—their contribution could turn out to have been transformative, important, originary. What geeks may lack in social adroitness, they make up for in archival hubris. 70 Finally, the theoretical contribution of Two Bits consists of a refinement of debates about publics, public spheres, and social imaginaries that appear troubled in the context of the Internet and Free Software. Terminology such as virtual community, online community, cyberspace, network society, or information society are generally not theoretical constructs, but ways of designating a subgenre of disciplinary research having to do with electronic networks. The need for a more precise analysis of the kinds of association that take place on and through information technology is clear; the first step is to make precise which information technologies and which specific practices make a difference. 71 There is a relatively large and growing literature on the Internet as a public sphere, but such literature is generally less concerned with refining the concept through research and more concerned with pronouncing whether or not the Internet fits Habermas's definition of the bourgeois public sphere, a definition primarily conceived to account for the eighteenth century in Britain, not the twenty-first-century Internet.21 The facts of technical and human life, as they unfold through the Internet and around the practices of Free Software, are not easy to cram into Habermas's definition. The goal of Two Bits is not to do so, but to offer conceptual clarity based in ethnographic fieldwork. 21 Dreyfus, On the Internet; Dean, "Why the Net Is Not a Public Sphere." 72 The key texts for understanding the concept of recursive publics are the works of Habermas, Charles Taylor's Modern Social Imaginaries, and Michael Warner's The Letters of the Republic and Publics and Counterpublics. Secondary texts that refine these notions are John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems and Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. Here it is not the public sphere per se that is the center of analysis, but the "ideas of modern moral and social order" and the terminology of "modern social imaginaries."22 I find these concepts to be useful as starting points for a very specific reason: to distinguish the meaning of moral order from the meaning of moral and technical order that I explore with respect to geeks. I do not seek to test the concept of social imaginary here, but to build something on top of it. [pg 23] 22 In addition, see Lippmann, The Phantom Public; Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere; Latour and Weibel, Making Things Public. The debate about social imaginaries begins alternately with Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities or with Cornelius Castoriadis's The Imaginary Institution of Society; see also Chatterjee, "A Response to Taylor's ‘ Modes of Civil Society'"; Gaonkar, "Toward New Imaginaries"; Charles Taylor, "Modes of Civil Society" and Sources of the Self. 73 If recursive public is a useful concept, it is because it helps elaborate the general question of the "reorientation of knowledge and power." In particular it is meant to bring into relief the ways in which the Internet and Free Software are related to the political economy of modern society through the creation not only of new knowledge, but of new infrastructures for circulating, maintaining, and modifying it. Just as Warner's book The Letters of the Republic was concerned with the emergence of the discourse of republicanism and the simultaneous development of an American republic of letters, or as Habermas's analysis was concerned with the relationship of the bourgeois public sphere to the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, this book asks a similar series of questions: how are the emergent practices of recursive publics related to emerging relations of political and technical life in a world that submits to the Internet and its forms of circulation? Is there still a role for a republic of letters, much less a species of public that can seriously claim independence and autonomy from other constituted forms of power? Are Habermas's pessimistic critiques of the bankruptcy of the public sphere in the twentieth century equally applicable to the structures of the twenty-first century? Or is it possible that recursive publics represent a reemergence of strong, authentic publics in a world shot through with cynicism and suspicion about mass media, verifiable knowledge, and enlightenment rationality? [PAGE 24: BLANK] 74 Part I the internet 75 The concept of the state, like most concepts which are introduced by "The," is both too rigid and too tied up with controversies to be of ready use. It is a concept which can be approached by a flank movement more easily than by a frontal attack. The moment we utter the words "The State" a score of intellectual ghosts rise to obscure our vision. Without our intention and without our notice, the notion of "The State" draws us imperceptibly into a consideration of the logical relationship of various ideas to one another, and away from the facts of human activity. It is better, if possible, to start from the latter and see if we are not led thereby into an idea of something which will turn out to implicate the marks and signs which characterize political behavior. 76 - john dewey, The Public and Its Problems 77 1. Geeks and Recursive Publics 78 Since about 1997, I have been living with geeks online and off. I have been drawn from Boston to Bangalore to Berlin to Houston to Palo Alto, from conferences and workshops to launch parties, pubs, and Internet Relay Chats (IRCs). All along the way in my research questions of commitment and practice, of ideology and imagination have arisen, even as the exact nature of the connections between these people and ideas remained obscure to me: what binds geeks together? As my fieldwork pulled me from a Boston start-up company that worked with radiological images to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurial elites in Bangalore, my logistical question eventually developed into an analytical concept: geeks are bound together as a recursive public. 79 How did I come to understand geeks as a public constituted around the technical and moral ideas of order that allow them to associate with one another? Through this question, one can start to understand the larger narrative of Two Bits: that of Free Software [pg 28] as an exemplary instance of a recursive public and as a set of practices that allow such publics to expand and spread. In this chapter I describe, ethnographically, the diverse, dispersed, and as an exemplary instance of a recursive public and as a set of practices that allow such publics to expand and spread. In this chapter I describe, ethnographically, the diverse, dispersed, and novel forms of entanglements that bind geeks together, and I construct the concept of a recursive public in order to explain these entanglements. 80 A recursive public is a public that is constituted by a shared concern for maintaining the means of association through which they come together as a public. Geeks find affinity with one another because they share an abiding moral imagination of the technical infrastructure, the Internet, that has allowed them to develop and maintain this affinity in the first place. I elaborate the concept of recursive public (which is not a term used by geeks) in relation to theories of ideology, publics, and public spheres and social imaginaries. I illustrate the concept through ethnographic stories and examples that highlight geeks' imaginations of the technical and moral order of the Internet. These stories include those of the fate of Amicas, a Boston-based healthcare start-up, between 1997 and 2003, of my participation with new media academics and activists in Berlin in 1999-2001, and of the activities of a group of largely Bangalore-based information technology (IT) professionals on and offline, especially concerning the events surrounding the peer-topeer file sharing application Napster in 2000-2001. 81 The phrase "moral and technical order" signals both technology—principally software, hardware, networks, and protocols—and an imagination of the proper order of collective political and commercial action, that is, how economy and society should be ordered collectively. Recursive publics are just as concerned with the moral order of markets as they are with that of commons; they are not anticommercial or antigovernment. They exist independent of, and as a check on, constituted forms of power, which include markets and corporations. Unlike other concepts of a public or of a public sphere, "recursive public" captures the fact that geeks' principal mode of associating and acting is through the medium of the Internet, and it is through this medium that a recursive public can come into being in the first place. The Internet is not itself a public sphere, a public, or a recursive public, but a complex, heterogeneous infrastructure that constitutes and constrains geeks' everyday practical commitments, their ability to "become public" or to compose a common world. As such, their participation qua recursive publics structures their identity as creative and autonomous [pg 29] individuals. The fact that the geeks described here have been brought together by mailing lists and e-mail, bulletin-board services and Web sites, books and modems, air travel and academia, and cross-talking and cross-posting in ways that were not possible before the Internet is at the core of their own reasoning about why they associate with each other. They are the builders and imaginers of this space, and the space is what allows them to build and imagine it. 82 Why recursive? I call such publics recursive for two reasons: first, in order to signal that this kind of public includes the activities of making, maintaining, and modifying software and networks, as well as the more conventional discourse that is thereby enabled; and second, in order to suggest the recursive "depth" of the public, the series of technical and legal layers—from applications to protocols to the physical infrastructures of waves and wires—that are the subject of this making, maintaining, and modifying. The first of these characteristics is evident in the fact that geeks use technology as a kind of argument, for a specific kind of order: they argue about technology, but they also argue through it. They express ideas, but they also express infrastructures through which ideas can be expressed (and circulated) in new ways. The second of these characteristics—regarding layers—is reflected in the ability of geeks to immediately see connections between, for example, Napster (a user application) and TCP/IP (a network protocol) and to draw out implications for both of them. By connecting these layers, Napster comes to represent the Internet in miniature. The question of where these layers stop (hardware? laws and regulations? physical constants? etc.) circumscribes the limits of the imagination of technical and moral order shared by geeks. 83 Above all, "recursive public" is a concept—not a thing. It is intended to make distinctions, allow comparison, highlight salient features, and relate two diverse kinds of things (the Internet and Free Software) in a particular historical context of changing relations of power and knowledge. The stories in this chapter (and throughout the book) give some sense of how geeks interact and what they do technically and legally, but the concept of a recursive public provides a way of explaining why geeks (or people involved in Free Software or its derivatives) associate with one another, as well as a way of testing whether other similar cases of contemporary, technologically mediated affinity are similarly structured. [pg 30] 84 Recursion 85 Recursion (or "recursive") is a mathematical concept, one which is a standard feature of any education in computer programming. The definition from the Oxford English Dictionary reads: "2. a. Involving or being a repeated procedure such that the required result at each step except the last is given in terms of the result(s) of the next step, until after a finite number of steps a terminus is reached with an outright evaluation of the result." It should be distinguished from simple iteration or repetition. Recursion is always subject to a limit and is more like a process of repeated deferral, until the last step in the process, at which point all the deferred steps are calculated and the result given. 86 Recursion is powerful in programming because it allows for the definition of procedures in terms of themselves—something that seems at first counterintuitive. So, for example, 87     ; otherwise return n times factorial of n-1;
    (defun (factorial n) ; This is the name of the function and its input n.
    (if (=n 1) ; This is the final limit, or recursive depth
    1 ; if n=1, then return 1
    (* n (factorial (- n 1)))))
    ; call the procedure from within itself, and
    ; calculate the next step of the result before
    ; giving an answer.1
 88 In Two Bits a recursive public is one whose existence (which consists solely in address through discourse) is only possible through discursive and technical reference to the means of creating this public. Recursiveness is always contingent on a limit which determines the depth of a recursive procedure. So, for instance, a Free Software project may depend on some other kind of software or operating system, which may in turn depend on particular open protocols or a particular process, which in turn depend on certain kinds of hardware that implement them. The "depth" of recursion is determined by the openness necessary for the project itself. 89 James Boyle has also noted the recursive nature, in particular, of Free Software: "What's more, and this is a truly fascinating twist, when the production process does need more centralized coordination, some governance that guides how the sticky modular bits are put together, it is at least theoretically possible that we can come up with the control system in exactly the same way. In this sense, distributed production is potentially recursive."2 90 1. Abelson and Sussman, The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, 30. 91 2. Boyle, "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain," 46. [pg 31] 92 From the Facts of Human Activity 93 Boston, May 2003. Starbucks. Sean and Adrian are on their way to pick me up for dinner. I've already had too much coffee, so I sit at the window reading the paper. Eventually Adrian calls to find out where I am, I tell him, and he promises to show up in fifteen minutes. I get bored and go outside to wait, watch the traffic go by. More or less right on time (only post-dotcom is Adrian ever on time), Sean's new blue VW Beetle rolls into view. Adrian jumps out of the passenger seat and into the back, and I get in. Sean has been driving for a little over a year. He seems confident, cautious, but meanders through the streets of Cambridge. We are destined for Winchester, a township on the Charles River, in order to go to an Indian restaurant that one of Sean's friends has recommended. When I ask how they are doing, they say, "Good, good." Adrian offers, "Well, Sean's better than he has been in two years." "Really?" I say, impressed. 94 Sean says, "Well, happier than at least the last year. I, well, let me put it this way: forgive me father for I have sinned, I still have unclean thoughts about some of the upper management in the company, I occasionally think they are not doing things in the best interest of the company, and I see them as self-serving and sometimes wish them ill." In this rolling blue confessional Sean describes some of the people who I am familiar with whom he now tries very hard not to think about. I look at him and say, "Ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers, and you will be absolved, my child." Turning to Adrian, I ask, "And what about you?" Adrian continues the joke: "I, too, have sinned. I have reached the point where I can see absolutely nothing good coming of this company but that I can keep my investments in it long enough to pay for my children's college tuition." I say, "You, my son, I cannot help." Sean says, "Well, funny thing about tainted money . . . there just taint enough of it." 95 I am awestruck. When I met Sean and Adrian, in 1997, their start-up company, Amicas, was full of spit, with five employees working out of Adrian's living room and big plans to revolutionize the medical-imaging world. They had connived to get Massachusetts General Hospital to install their rudimentary system and let it compete with the big corporate sloths that normally stalked back offices: General Electric, Agfa, Siemens. It was these behemoths, according to Sean and Adrian, that were bilking hospitals [pg 32] and healthcare providers with promises of cure-all technologies and horribly designed "silos," "legacy systems," and other closed-system monsters of corporate IT harkening back to the days of IBM mainframes. These beasts obviously did not belong to the gleaming future of Internet-enabled scalability. By June of 2000, Amicas had hired new "professional" management, moved to Watertown, and grown to about a hundred employees. They had achieved their goal of creating an alternative Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) for use in hospital radiology departments and based on Internet standards. 96 At that point, in the spring of 2000, Sean could still cheerfully introduce me to his new boss—the same man he would come to hate, inasmuch as Sean hates anyone. But by 2002 he was frustrated by the extraordinary variety of corner-cutting and, more particularly, by the complacency with which management ignored his recommendations and released software that was almost certainly going to fail later, if not sooner. Sean, who is sort of permanently callow about things corporate, could find no other explanation than that the new management was evil. 97 But by 2003 the company had succeeded, having grown to more than 200 employees and established steady revenue and a stable presence throughout the healthcare world. Both Sean and Adrian were made rich—not wildly rich, but rich enough—by its success. In the process, however, it also morphed into exactly what Sean and Adrian had created it in order to fight: a slothlike corporate purveyor of promises and broken software. Promises Adrian had made and software Sean had built. The failure of Amicas to transform healthcare was a failure too complex and technical for most of America to understand, but it rested atop the success of Amicas in terms more readily comprehensible: a growing company making profit. Adrian and Sean had started the company not to make money, but in order to fix a broken healthcare system; yet the system stayed broken while they made money. 98 In the rolling confessional, Sean and Adrian did in fact see me, however jokingly, as a kind of redeemer, a priest (albeit of an order with no flock) whose judgment of the affairs past was essential to their narration of their venture as a success, a failure, or as an unsatisfying and complicated mixture of both. I thought about this strange moment of confession, of the combination of recognition and denial, of Adrian's new objectification of the company as an [pg 33] investment opportunity, and of Sean's continuing struggle to make his life and his work harmonize in order to produce good in the world. Only the promise of the next project, the next mission (and the ostensible reason for our dinner meeting) could possibly have mitigated the emotional disaster that their enterprise might otherwise be. Sean's and Adrian's endless, arcane fervor for the promise of new technologies did not cease, even given the quotidian calamities these technologies leave in their wake. Their faith was strong, and continuously tested. 99 Adrian's and Sean's passion was not for money—though money was a powerful drug—it was for the Internet: for the ways in which the Internet could replace the existing infrastructure of hospitals and healthcare providers, deliver on old promises of telemedicine and teleradiology, and, above all, level a playing field systematically distorted and angled by corporate and government institutions that sought secrecy and private control, and stymied progress. In healthcare, as Adrian repeatedly explained to me, this skewed playing field was not only unfair but malicious and irresponsible. It was costing lives. It slowed the creation and deployment of technologies and solutions that could lower costs and thus provide more healthcare for more people. The Internet was not part of the problem; it was part of the solution to the problems that ailed 1990s healthcare. 100 At the end of our car trip, at the Indian restaurant in Winchester, I learned about their next scheme, a project called MedCommons, which would build on the ideals of Free Software and give individuals a way to securely control and manage their own healthcare data. The rhetoric of commons and the promise of the Internet as an infrastructure dominated our conversation, but the realities of funding and the question of whether MedCommons could be pursued without starting another company remained unsettled. I tried to imagine what form a future confession might take. 101 Geeks and Their Internets 102 Sean and Adrian are geeks. They are entrepreneurs and idealists in different ways, a sometimes paradoxical combination. They are certainly [pg 34] obsessed with technology, but especially with the Internet, and they clearly distinguish themselves from others who are obsessed with technology of just any sort. They aren't quite representative—they do not stand in for all geeks—but the way they think about the Internet and its possibilities might be. Among the rich story of their successes and failures, one might glimpse the outlines of a question: where do their sympathies lie? Who are they with? Who do they recognize as being like them? What might draw them together with other geeks if not a corporation, a nation, a language, or a cause? What binds these two geeks to any others? 103 Sean worked for the Federal Reserve in the 1980s, where he was introduced to UNIX, C programming, EMACS, Usenet, Free Software, and the Free Software Foundation. But he was not a Free Software hacker; indeed, he resisted my attempts to call him a hacker at all. Nevertheless, he started a series of projects and companies with Adrian that drew on the repertoire of practices and ideas familiar from Free Software, including their MedCommons project, which was based more or less explicitly in the ideals of Free Software. Adrian has a degree in medicine and in engineering, and is a serial entrepreneur, with Amicas being his biggest success—and throughout the last ten years has attended all manner of conferences and meetings devoted to Free Software, Open Source, open standards, and so on, almost always as the lone representative from healthcare. Both graduated from the MIT (Sean in economics, Adrian in engineering), one of the more heated cauldrons of the Internet and the storied home of hackerdom, but neither were MIT hackers, nor even computer-science majors. 104 Their goals in creating a start-up rested on their understanding of the Internet as an infrastructure: as a standardized infrastructure with certain extremely powerful properties, not the least of which was its flexibility. Sean and Adrian talked endlessly about open systems, open standards, and the need for the Internet to remain open and standardized. Adrian spoke in general terms about how it would revolutionize healthcare; Sean spoke in specific terms about how it structured the way Amicas's software was being designed and written. Both participated in standards committees and in the online and offline discussions that are tantamount to policymaking in the Internet world. The company they created was a "virtual" company, that is, built on tools that depended on the Internet and allowed employees to manage and work from a variety of locations, though not without frustration, of course: Sean waited years for broadband access in his home, and the hospitals they served [pg 35] hemmed themselves in with virtual private networks, intranets, and security firewalls that betrayed the promises of openness that Sean and Adrian heralded. 105 The Internet was not the object of their work and lives, but it did represent in detail a kind of moral or social order embodied in a technical system and available to everyone to use as a platform whereby they might compete to improve and innovate in any realm. To be sure, although not all Internet entrepreneurs of the 1990s saw the Internet in the same way, Sean and Adrian were hardly alone in their vision. Something about the particular way in which they understood the Internet as representing a moral order—simultaneously a network, a market, a public, and a technology—was shared by a large group of people, those who I now refer to simply as geeks. 106 The term geek is meant to be inclusive and to index the problematic of a recursive public. Other terms may be equally useful, but perhaps semantically overdetermined, most notably hacker, which regardless of its definitional range, tends to connote someone subversive and/or criminal and to exclude geek-sympathetic entrepreneurs and lawyers and activists.23 Geek is meant to signal, like the public in "recursive public," that geeks stand outside power, at least in some aspects, and that they are not capitalists or technocrats, even if they start businesses or work in government or industry.24 Geek is meant to signal a mode of thinking and working, not an identity; it is a mode or quality that allows people to find each other, for reasons other than the fact that they share an office, a degree, a language, or a nation. 23 For the canonical story, see Levy, Hackers. Hack referred to (and still does) a clever use of technology, usually unintended by the maker, to achieve some task in an elegant manner. The term has been successfully redefined by the mass media to refer to computer users who break into and commit criminal acts on corporate or government or personal computers connected to a network. Many self-identified hackers insist that the criminal element be referred to as crackers (see, in particular, the entries on "Hackers," "Geeks" and "Crackers" in The Jargon File, <http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/>, also published as Raymond, The New Hackers' Dictionary). On the subject of definitions and the cultural and ethical characteristics of hackers, see Coleman, "The Social Construction of Freedom," chap. 2. 24 One example of the usage of geek is in Star, The Cultures of Computing. Various denunciations (e.g., Barbrook and Cameron, "The California Ideology"; Borsook, Technolibertarianism) tend to focus on journalistic accounts of an ideology that has little to do with what hackers, geeks, and entrepreneurs actually make. A more relevant categorical distinction than that between hackers and geeks is that between geeks and technocrats; in the case of technocrats, the "anthropology of technocracy" is proposed as the study of the limits of technical rationality, in particular the forms through which "planning" creates "gaps in the form that serve as ‘ targets of intervention'" (Riles, "Real Time," 393). Riles's "technocrats" are certainly not the "geeks" I portray here (or at least, if they are, it is only in their frustrating day jobs). Geeks do have libertarian, specifically Hayekian or Feyerabendian leanings, but are more likely to see technical failures not as failures of planning, but as bugs, inefficiencies, or occasionally as the products of human hubris or stupidity that is born of a faith in planning. 107 Until the mid-1990s, hacker, geek, and computer nerd designated a very specific type: programmers and lurkers on relatively underground networks, usually college students, computer scientists, and "amateurs" or "hobbyists." A classic mock self-diagnostic called the Geek Code, by Robert Hayden, accurately and humorously detailed the various ways in which one could be a geek in 1996—UNIX/ Linux skills, love/hate of Star Trek, particular eating and clothing habits—but as Hayden himself points out, the geeks of the early 1990s exist no longer. The elite subcultural, relatively homogenous group it once was has been overrun: "The Internet of 1996 was still a wild untamed virgin paradise of geeks and eggheads unpopulated by script kiddies, and the denizens of AOL. When things changed, I seriously lost my way. I mean, all the ‘ geek' that was the Internet [pg 36] was gone and replaced by Xfiles buzzwords and politicians passing laws about a technology they refused to comprehend."25 25 See The Geek Code, <http://www.geekcode.com/>. 108 For the purists like Hayden, geeks were there first, and they understood something, lived in a way, that simply cannot be comprehended by "script kiddies" (i.e., teenagers who perform the hacking equivalent of spray painting or cow tipping), crackers, or AOL users, all of whom are despised by Hayden-style geeks as unskilled users who parade around the Internet as if they own it. While certainly elitist, Hayden captures the distinction between those who are legitimately allowed to call themselves geeks (or hackers) and those who aren't, a distinction that is often formulated recursively, of course: "You are a hacker when another hacker calls you a hacker." 109 However, since the explosive growth of the Internet, geek has become more common a designation, and my use of the term thus suggests a role that is larger than programmer/hacker, but not as large as "all Internet users." Despite Hayden's frustration, geeks are still bound together as an elite and can be easily distinguished from "AOL users." Some of the people I discuss would not call themselves geeks, and some would. Not all are engineers or programmers: I have met businessmen, lawyers, activists, bloggers, gastroenterologists, anthropologists, lesbians, schizophrenics, scientists, poets, people suffering from malaria, sea captains, drug dealers, and people who keep lemurs, many of whom refer to themselves as geeks, some of the time.26 There are also lawyers, politicians, sociologists, and economists who may not refer to themselves as geeks, but who care about the Internet just as other geeks do. By contrast "users" of the Internet, even those who use it eighteen out of twenty-four hours in a day to ship goods and play games, are not necessarily geeks by this characterization. 26 Geeks are also identified often by the playfulness and agility with which they manipulate these labels and characterizations. See Michael M. J. Fischer, "Worlding Cyberspace" for an example. 110 Operating Systems and Social Systems 111 Berlin, November 1999. I am in a very hip club in Mitte called WMF. It's about eight o'clock—five hours too early for me to be a hipster, but the context is extremely cool. WMF is in a hard-to-find, abandoned building in the former East; it is partially converted, filled with a mixture of new and old furnishings, video projectors, speakers, makeshift bars, and dance-floor lighting. A crowd of around fifty people lingers amid smoke and Beck's beer bottles, [pg 37] sitting on stools and chairs and sofas and the floor. We are listening to an academic read a paper about Claude Shannon, the MIT engineer credited with the creation of information theory. The author is smoking and reading in German while the audience politely listens. He speaks for about seventy minutes. There are questions and some perfunctory discussion. As the crowd breaks up, I find myself, in halting German that quickly converts to English, having a series of animated conversations about the GNU General Public License, the Debian Linux Distribution, open standards in net radio, and a variety of things for which Claude Shannon is the perfect ghostly technopaterfamilias, even if his seventy-minute invocation has clashed heavily with the surroundings. 112 Despite my lame German, I still manage to jump deeply into issues that seem extremely familiar: Internet standards and open systems and licensing issues and namespaces and patent law and so on. These are not businesspeople, this is not a start-up company. As I would eventually learn, there was even a certain disdain for die Krawattenfaktor, the suit-and-tie factor, at these occasional, hybrid events hosted by Mikro e.V., a nonprofit collective of journalists, academics, activists, artists, and others interested in new media, the Internet, and related issues. Mikro's constituency included people from Germany, Holland, Austria, and points eastward. They took some pride in describing Berlin as "the farthest East the West gets" and arranged for a group photo in which, facing West, they stood behind the statue of Marx and Lenin, who face East and look eternally at the iconic East German radio tower (Funkturm) in Alexanderplatz. Mikro's members are resolutely activist and see the issues around the Internet-as-infrastructure not in terms of its potential for business opportunities, but in urgently political and unrepentantly aesthetic terms—terms that are nonetheless similar to those of Sean and Adrian, from whom I learned the language that allows me to mingle with the Mikro crowd at WMF. I am now a geek. 113 Before long, I am talking with Volker Grassmuck, founding member of Mikro and organizer of the successful "Wizards of OS" conference, held earlier in the year, which had the very intriguing subtitle "Operating Systems and Social Systems." Grassmuck is inviting me to participate in a planning session for the next WOS, held at the Chaos Computer Congress, a hacker gathering that occurs each year in December in Berlin. In the following months I will meet a huge number of people who seem, uncharacteristically for artists [pg 38] and activists, strangely obsessed with configuring their Linux distributions or hacking the http protocol or attending German Parliament hearings on copyright reform. The political lives of these folks have indeed mixed up operating systems and social systems in ways that are more than metaphorical. 114 The Idea of Order at the Keyboard 115 If intuition can lead one from geek to geek, from start-up to nightclub, and across countries, languages, and professional orientations, it can only be due to a shared set of ideas of how things fit together in the world. These ideas might be "cultural" in the traditional sense of finding expression among a community of people who share backgrounds, homes, nations, languages, idioms, ethnos, norms, or other designators of belonging and co-presence. But because the Internet—like colonialism, satellite broadcasting, and air travel, among other things—crosses all these lines with abandon that the shared idea of order is better understood as part of a public, or public sphere, a vast republic of letters and media and ideas circulating in and through our thoughts and papers and letters and conversations, at a planetary scope and scale. 116 "Public sphere" is an odd kind of thing, however. It is at once a concept—intended to make sense of a space that is not the here and now, but one made up of writings, ideas, and discussions—and a set of ideas that people have about themselves and their own participation in such a space. I must be able to imagine myself speaking and being spoken to in such a space and to imagine a great number of other people also doing so according to unwritten rules we share. I don't need a complete theory, and I don't need to call it a public sphere, but I must somehow share an idea of order with all those other people who also imagine themselves participating in and subjecting themselves to that order. In fact, if the public sphere exists as more than just a theory, then it has no other basis than just such a shared imagination of order, an imagination which provides a guide against which to make judgments and a map for changing or achieving that order. Without such a shared imagination, a public sphere is otherwise nothing more than a cacophony of voices and information, nothing more than a stream of data, structured and formatted by and for machines, whether paper or electronic. [pg 39] 117 Charles Taylor, building on the work of Jýrgen Habermas and Michael Warner, suggests that the public sphere (both idea and thing) that emerged in the eighteenth century was created through practices of communication and association that reflected a moral order in which the public stands outside power and guides or checks its operation through shared discourse and enlightened discussion. Contrary to the experience of bodies coming together into a common space (Taylor calls them "topical spaces," such as conversation, ritual, assembly), the crucial component is that the public sphere "transcends such topical spaces. We might say that it knits a plurality of spaces into one larger space of non-assembly. The same public discussion is deemed to pass through our debate today, and someone else's earnest conversation tomorrow, and the newspaper interview Thursday and so on. . . . The public sphere that emerges in the eighteenth century is a meta-topical common space."27 27 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 86. 118 Because of this, Taylor refers to his version of a public as a "social imaginary," a way of capturing a phenomena that wavers between having concrete existence "out there" and imagined rational existence "in here." There are a handful of other such imagined spaces—the economy, the self-governing people, civil society—and in Taylor's philosophical history they are related to each through the "ideas of moral and social order" that have developed in the West and around the world.28 28 On the subject of imagined communities and the role of information technologies in imagined networks, see Green, Harvey, and Knox, "Scales of Place and Networks"; and Flichy, The Internet Imaginaire. 119 Taylor's social imaginary is intended to do something specific: to resist the "spectre of idealism," the distinction between ideas and practices, between "ideologies" and the so-called material world as "rival causal agents." Taylor suggests, "Because human practices are the kind of thing that makes sense, certain ideas are internal to them; one cannot distinguish the two in order to ask the question Which causes which?"29 Even if materialist explanations of cause are satisfying, as they often are, Taylor suggests that they are so "at the cost of being implausible as a universal principle," and he offers instead an analysis of the rise of the modern imaginaries of moral order.30 29 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 32. 30 Ibid., 33-48. Taylor's history of the transition from feudal nobility to civil society to the rise of republican democracies (however incomplete) is comparable to Foucault's history of the birth of biopolitics, in La naissance de la biopolitique, as an attempt to historicize governance with respect to its theories and systems, as well as within the material forms it takes. 120 The concept of recursive public, like that of Taylor's public sphere, is understood here as a kind of social imaginary. The primary reason is to bypass the dichotomy between ideas and material practice. Because the creation of software, networks, and legal documents are precisely the kinds of activities that trouble this distinction—they are at once ideas and things that have material effects in the [pg 40] world, both expressive and performative—it is extremely difficult to identify the properly material materiality (source code? computer chips? semiconductor manufacturing plants?). This is the first of the reasons why a recursive public is to be distinguished from the classic formulae of the public sphere, that is, that it requires a kind of imagination that includes the writing and publishing and speaking and arguing we are familiar with, as well as the making of new kinds of software infrastructures for the circulation, archiving, movement, and modifiability of our enunciations. 121 The concept of a social imaginary also avoids the conundrums created by the concept of "ideology" and its distinction from material practice. Ideology in its technical usage has been slowly and surely overwhelmed by its pejorative meaning: "The ideological is never one's own position; it is always the stance of someone else, always their ideology."31 If one were to attempt an explanation of any particular ideology in nonpejorative terms, there is seemingly nothing that might rescue the explanation from itself becoming ideological. 31 Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 2. 122 The problem is an old one. Clifford Geertz noted it in "Ideology as a Cultural System," as did Karl Mannheim before him in Ideology and Utopia: it is the difficulty of employing a non-evaluative concept of ideology.32 Of all the versions of struggle over the concept of a scientific or objective sociology, it is the claim of exploring ideology objectively that most rankles. As Geertz put it, "Men do not care to have beliefs to which they attach great moral significance examined dispassionately, no matter for how pure a purpose; and if they are themselves highly ideologized, they may find it simply impossible to believe that a disinterested approach to critical matters of social and political conviction can be other than a scholastic sham."33 32 Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural System"; Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. Both, of course, also signal the origin of the scientific use of the term proximately with Karl Marx's "German Ideology" and more distantly in the Enlightenment writings of Destutt de Tracy. 33 Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural System," 195. 123 Mannheim offered one response: a version of epistemological relativism in which the analysis of ideology included the ideological position of the analyst. Geertz offered another: a science of "symbolic action" based in Kenneth Burke's work and drawing on a host of philosophers and literary critics.34 Neither the concept of ideology, nor the methods of cultural anthropology have been the same since. "Ideology" has become one of the most widely deployed (some might say, most diffuse) tools of critique, where critique is understood as the analysis of cultural patterns given in language and symbolic structures, for the purposes of bringing [pg 41] to light systems of hegemony, domination, authority, resistance, and/or misrecognition.35 However, the practices of critique are just as (if not more) likely to be turned on critical scholars themselves, to show how the processes of analysis, hidden assumptions, latent functions of the university, or other unrecognized features the material, non-ideological real world cause the analyst to fall into an ideological trap. 34 Ibid., 208-13. 35 The depth and the extent of this issue is obviously huge. Ricoeur's Lectures on Ideology and Utopia is an excellent analysis to the problem of ideology prior to 1975. Terry Eagleton's books The Ideology of the Aesthetic and Ideology: An Introduction are Marxist explorations that include discussions of hegemony and resistance in the context of artistic and literary theory in the 1980s. Slavoj Žižek creates a Lacanian-inspired algebraic system of analysis that combines Marxism and psychoanalysis in novel ways (see Žižek, Mapping Ideology). There is even an attempt to replace the concept of ideology with a metaphor of "software" and "memes" (see Balkin, Cultural Software). The core of the issue of ideology as a practice (and the vicissitudes of materialism that trouble it) are also at the heart of works by Pierre Bourdieu and his followers (on the relationship of ideology and hegemony, see Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy). In anthropology, see Comaroff and Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. 124 The concept of ideology takes a turn toward "social imaginary" in Paul Ricoeur's Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, where he proposes ideological and utopian thought as two components of "social and cultural imagination." Ricoeur's overview divides approaches to the concept of ideology into three basic types—the distorting, the integrating, and the legitimating—according to how actors deal with reality through (symbolic) imagination. Does the imagination distort reality, integrate it, or legitimate it vis-à-vis the state? Ricoeur defends the second, Geertzian flavor: ideologies integrate the symbolic structure of the world into a meaningful whole, and "only because the structure of social life is already symbolic can it be distorted."36 36 Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 10. 125 For Ricoeur, the very substance of life begins in the interpretation of reality, and therefore ideologies (as well as utopias—and perhaps conspiracies) could well be treated as systems that integrate those interpretations into the meaningful wholes of political life. Ricoeur's analysis of the integration of reality though social imagination, however, does not explicitly address how imagination functions: what exactly is the nature of this symbolic action or interpretation, or imagination? Can one know it from the outside, and does it resist the distinction between ideology and material practice? Both Ricoeur and Geertz harbor hope that ideology can be made scientific, that the integration of reality through symbolic action requires only the development of concepts adequate to the job. 126 Re-enter Charles Taylor. In Modern Social Imaginaries the concept of social imaginary is distinctive in that it attempts to capture the specific integrative imaginations of modern moral and social order. Taylor stresses that they are imaginations—not necessarily theories—of modern moral and social order: "By social imaginary, I mean something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of the ways in [pg 42] which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations."37 Social imaginaries develop historically and result in both new institutions and new subjectivities; the concepts of public, market, and civil society (among others) are located in the imaginative faculties of actors who recognize the shared, common existence of these ideas, even if they differ on the details, and the practices of those actors reflect a commitment to working out these shared concepts. 37 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23. 127 Social imaginaries are an extension of "background" in the philosophical sense: "a wider grasp of our whole predicament."38 The example Taylor uses is that of marching in a demonstration: the action is in our imaginative repertory and has a meaning that cannot be reduced to the local context: "We know how to assemble, pick up banners and march. . . . [W]e understand the ritual. . . . [T]he immediate sense of what we are doing, getting the message to our government and our fellow citizens that the cuts must stop, say, makes sense in a wider context, in which we see ourselves standing in a continuing relation with others, in which it is appropriate to address them in this manner."39 But we also stand "internationally" and "in history" against a background of stories, images, legends, symbols, and theories. "The background that makes sense of any given act is wide and deep. It doesn't include everything in our world, but the relevant sense-giving features can't be circumscribed. . . . [It] draws on our whole world, that is, our sense of our whole predicament in time and space, among others and in history."40 38 Ibid., 25. 39 Ibid., 26-27. 40 Ibid., 28. 128 The social imaginary is not simply the norms that structure our actions; it is also a sense of what makes norms achievable or "realizable," as Taylor says. This is the idea of a "moral order," one that we expect to exist, and if it doesn't, one that provides a plan for achieving it. For Taylor, there is such a thing as a "modern idea of order," which includes, among other things, ideas of what it means to be an individual, ideas of how individual passions and desires are related to collective association, and, most important, ideas about living in time together (he stresses a radically secular conception of time—secular in a sense that means more than simply "outside religion"). He by no means insists that this is the only such definition of modernity (the door is wide open to understanding alternative modernities), but that the modern idea of moral order is [pg 43] one that dominates and structures a very wide array of institutions and individuals around the world. 129 The "modern idea of moral order" is a good place to return to the question of geeks and their recursive publics. Are the ideas of order shared by geeks different from those Taylor outlines? Do geeks like Sean and Adrian, or activists in Berlin, possess a distinctive social imaginary? Or do they (despite their planetary dispersal) participate in this common modern idea of moral order? Do the stories and narratives, the tools and technologies, the theories and imaginations they follow and build on have something distinctive about them? Sean's and Adrian's commitment to transforming healthcare seems to be, for instance, motivated by a notion of moral order in which the means of allocation of healthcare might become more just, but it is also shot through with technical ideas about the role of standards, the Internet, and the problems with current technical solutions; so while they may seem to be simply advocating for better healthcare, they do so through a technical language and practice that are probably quite alien to policymakers, upper management, and healthcare advocacy groups that might otherwise be in complete sympathy. 130 The affinity of geeks for each other is processed through and by ideas of order that are both moral and technical—ideas of order that do indeed mix up "operating systems and social systems." These systems include the technical means (the infrastructure) through which geeks meet, assemble, collaborate, and plan, as well as how they talk and think about those activities. The infrastructure—the Internet—allows for a remarkably wide and diverse array of people to encounter and engage with each other. That is to say, the idea of order shared by geeks is shared because they are geeks, because they "get it," because the Internet's structure and software have taken a particular form through which geeks come to understand the moral order that gives the fabric of their political lives warp and weft. 131 Internet Silk Road 132 Bangalore, March 2000. I am at another bar, this time on one of Bangalore's trendiest streets. The bar is called Purple Haze, and I have been taken there, the day after my arrival, by Udhay Shankar [pg 44] N. Inside it is dark and smoky, purple, filled with men between eighteen and thirty, and decorated with posters of Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Jim Morrison (Udhay: "I hate that band"), Led Zeppelin, and a somewhat out of place Frank Zappa (Udhay: "One of my political and musical heroes"). All of the men, it appears, are singing along with the music, which is almost without exception heavy metal. 133 I engage in some stilted conversation with Udhay and his cousin Kirti about the difference between Karnatic music and rock-androll, which seems to boil down to the following: Karnatic music decreases metabolism and heart rate, leading to a relaxed state of mind; rock music does the opposite. Given my aim of focusing on the Internet and questions of openness, I have already decided not to pay attention to this talk of music. In retrospect, I understand this to have been a grave methodological error: I underestimated the extent to which the subject of music has been one of the primary routes into precisely the questions about the "reorientation of knowledge and power" I was interested in. Over the course of the evening and the following days, Udhay introduced me, as promised, to a range of people he either knew or worked with in some capacity. Almost all of the people I met appeared to sincerely love heavy-metal music. 134 I met Udhay Shankar N. in 1999 through a newsletter, distributed via e-mail, called Tasty Bits from the Technology Front. It was one of a handful of sources I watched closely while in Berlin, looking for such connections to geek culture. The newsletter described a start-up company in Bangalore, one that was devoted to creating a gateway between the Internet and mobile phones, and which was, according to the newsletter, an entirely Indian operation, though presumably with U.S. venture funds. I wanted to find a company to compare to Amicas: a start-up, run by geeks, with a similar approach to the Internet, but halfway around the world and in a "culture" that might be presumed to occupy a very different kind of moral order. Udhay invited me to visit and promised to introduce me to everyone he knew. He described himself as a "random networker"; he was not really a programmer or a designer or a Free Software geek, despite his extensive knowledge of software, devices, operating systems, and so on, including Free and Open Source Software. Neither was he a businessman, but rather described himself as the guy who "translates between the suits and the techs." [pg 45] 135 Udhay "collects interesting people," and it was primarily through his zest for collecting that I met all the people I did. I met cosmopolitan activists and elite lawyers and venture capitalists and engineers and cousins and brothers and sisters of engineers. I met advertising executives and airline flight attendants and consultants in Bombay. I met journalists and gastroenterologists, computer-science professors and musicians, and one mother of a robot scientist in Bangalore. Among them were Muslims, Hindus, Jains, Jews, Parsis, and Christians, but most of them considered themselves more secular and scientific than religious. Many were self-educated, or like their U.S. counterparts, had dropped out of university at some point, but continued to teach themselves about computers and networks. Some were graduates or employees of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, an institution that was among the most important for Indian geeks (as Stanford University is to Silicon Valley, many would say). Among the geeks to whom Udhay introduced me, there were only two commonalities: the geeks were, for the most part, male, and they all loved heavy-metal music.41 41 The question of gender plagues the topic of computer culture. The gendering of hackers and geeks and the more general exclusion of women in computing have been widely observed by academics. I can do no more here than direct readers to the increasingly large and sophisticated literature on the topic. See especially Light, "When Computers Were Women"; Turkle, The Second Self and Life on the Screen. With respect to Free Software, see Nafus, Krieger, Leach, "Patches Don't Have Gender." More generally, see Kirkup et al., The Gendered Cyborg; Downey, The Machine in Me; Faulkner, "Dualisms, Hierarchies and Gender in Engineering"; Grint and Gill, The Gender-Technology Relation; Helmreich, Silicon Second Nature; Herring, "Gender and Democracy in Computer-Mediated Communication"; Kendall, "‘Oh No! I'm a NERD!'"; Margolis and Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse; Green and Adam, Virtual Gender; P. Hopkins, Sex/Machine; Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology and "Reflections on Gender and Technology Studies"; and Fiona Wilson, "Can't Compute, Won't Compute." Also see the novels and stories of Ellen Ullman, including Close to the Machine and The Bug: A Novel. 136 While I was in Bangalore, I was invited to join a mailing list run by Udhay called Silk-list, an irregular, unmoderated list devoted to "intelligent conversation." The list has no particular focus: long, meandering conversations about Indian politics, religion, economics, and history erupt regularly; topics range from food to science fiction to movie reviews to discussions on Kashmir, Harry Potter, the singularity, or nanotechnology. Udhay started Silk-list in 1997 with Bharath Chari and Ram Sundaram, and the recipients have included hundreds of people around the world, some very well-known ones, programmers, lawyers, a Bombay advertising executive, science-fiction authors, entrepreneurs, one member of the start-up Amicas, at least two transhumanists, one (diagnosed) schizophrenic, and myself. Active participants usually numbered about ten to fifteen, while many more lurked in the background. 137 Silk-list is an excellent index of the relationship between the network of people in Bangalore and their connection to a worldwide community on the Internet—a fascinating story of the power of heterogeneously connected networks and media. Udhay explained that in the early 1990s he first participated in and then taught himself to configure and run a modem-based networking system known as a Bulletin Board Service (BBS) in Bangalore. In 1994 he heard about a book by Howard Rheingold called The Virtual [pg 46] Community, which was his first introduction to the Internet. A couple of years later when he finally had access to the Internet, he immediately e-mailed John Perry Barlow, whose work he knew from Wired magazine, to ask for Rheingold's e-mail address in order to connect with him. Rheingold and Barlow exist, in some ways, at the center of a certain kind of geek world: Rheingold's books are widely read popular accounts of the social and community aspects of new technologies that have often had considerable impact internationally; Barlow helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is responsible for popularizing the phrase "information wants to be free."42 Both men had a profound influence on Udhay and ultimately provided him with the ideas central to running an online community. A series of other connections of similar sorts—some personal, some precipitated out of other media and other channels, some entirely random—are what make up the membership of Silk-list.43 42 Originally coined by Steward Brand, the phrase was widely cited after it appeared in Barlow's 1994 article "The Economy of Ideas." 43 On the genesis of "virtual communities" and the role of Steward Brand, see Turner, "Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy." 138 Like many similar communities of "digerati" during and after the dot.com boom, Silk-list constituted itself more or less organically around people who "got it," that is, people who claimed to understand the Internet, its transformative potential, and who had the technical skills to participate in its expansion. Silk-list was not the only list of its kind. Others such as the Tasty Bits newsletter, the FoRK (Friends of Rohit Khare) mailing list (both based in Boston), and the Nettime and Syndicate mailing lists (both based in the Netherlands) ostensibly had different reasons for existence, but many had the same subscribers and overlapping communities of geeks. Subscription was open to anyone, and occasionally someone would stumble on the list and join in, but most were either invited by members or friends of friends, or they were connected by virtue of cross-posting from any number of other mailing lists to which members were subscribed. 139 /pub 140 Silk-list is public in many senses of the word. Practically speaking, one need not be invited to join, and the material that passes through the list is publicly archived and can be found easily on the Internet. Udhay does his best to encourage everyone to speak and to participate, and to discourage forms of discourse that he thinks [pg 47] might silence participants into lurking. Silk-list is not a government, corporate, or nongovernmental list, but is constituted only through the activity of geeks finding each other and speaking to each other on this list (which can happen in all manner of ways: through work, through school, through conferences, through fame, through random association, etc.). Recall Charles Taylor's distinction between a topical and a metatopical space. Silk-list is not a conventionally topical space: at no point do all of its members meet face-to-face (though there are regular meet-ups in cities around the world), and they are not all online at the same time (though the volume and tempo of messages often reflect who is online "speaking" to each other at any given moment). It is a topical space, however, if one considers it from the perspective of the machine: the list of names on the mailing list are all assembled together in a database, or in a file, on the server that manages the mailing list. It is a stretch to call this an "assembly," however, because it assembles only the avatars of the mailing-list readers, many of whom probably ignore or delete most of the messages. 141 Silk-list is certainly, on the other hand, a "metatopical" public. It "knits together" a variety of topical spaces: my discussion with friends in Houston, and other members' discussions with people around the world, as well as the sources of multiple discussions like newspaper and magazine articles, films, events, and so on that are reported and discussed online. But Silk-list is not "The" public—it is far from being the only forum in which the public sphere is knitted together. Many, many such lists exist. 142 In Publics and Counterpublics Michael Warner offers a further distinction. "The" public is a social imaginary, one operative in the terms laid out by Taylor: as a kind of vision of order evidenced through stories, images, narratives, and so on that constitute the imagination of what it means to be part of the public, as well as plans necessary for creating the public, if necessary. Warner distinguishes, however, between a concrete, embodied audience, like that at a play, a demonstration, or a riot (a topical public in Taylor's terms), and an audience brought into being by discourse and its circulation, an audience that is not metatopical so much as it is a public that is concrete in a different way; it is concrete not in the face-to-face temporality of the speech act, but in the sense of calling a public into being through an address that has a different temporality. It is a public that is concrete in a media-specific [pg 48] manner: it depends on the structures of creation, circulation, use, performance, and reuse of particular kinds of discourse, particular objects or instances of discourse. 143 Warner's distinction has a number of implications. The first, as Warner is careful to note, is that the existence of particular media is not sufficient for a public to come into existence. Just because a book is printed does not mean that a public exists; it requires also that the public take corresponding action, that is, that they read it. To be part of a particular public is to choose to pay attention to those who choose to address those who choose to pay attention . . . and so on. Or as Warner puts it, "The circularity is essential to the phenomenon. A public might be real and efficacious, but its reality lies in just this reflexivity by which an addressable object is conjured into being in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence."44 44 Warner, "Publics and Counterpublics," 51. 144 This "autotelic" feature of a public is crucial if one is to understand the function of a public as standing outside of power. It simply cannot be organized by the state, by a corporation, or by any other social totality if it is to have the legitimacy of an independently functioning public. As Warner puts it, "A public organizes itself independently of state institutions, law, formal frameworks of citizenship, or preexisting institutions such as the church. If it were not possible to think of the public as organized independently of the state or other frameworks, the public could not be sovereign with respect to the state. . . . Speaking, writing, and thinking involve us—actively and immediately—in a public, and thus in the being of the sovereign."45 45 Ibid., 51-52. See also Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 69. 145 Warner's description makes no claim that any public or even The Public actually takes this form in the present: it is a description of a social imaginary or a "faith" that allows individuals to make sense of their actions according to a modern idea of social order. As Warner (and Habermas before him) suggests, the existence of such autonomous publics—and certainly the idea of "public opinion"— does not always conform to this idea of order. Often such publics turn out to have been controlled all along by states, corporations, capitalism, and other forms of social totality that determine the nature of discourse in insidious ways. A public whose participants have no faith that it is autotelic and autonomous is little more than a charade meant to assuage opposition to authority, to transform [pg 49] political power and equality into the negotiation between unequal parties. 146 Is Silk-list a public? More important, is it a sovereign one? Warner's distinction between different media-specific forms of assembly is crucial to answering this question. If one wants to know whether a mailing list on the Internet is more or less likely to be a sovereign public than a book-reading public or the nightly-news-hearing one, then one needs to approach it from the specificity of the form of discourse. This specificity not only includes whether the form is text or video and audio, or whether the text is ASCII or Unicode, or the video PAL or NTSC, but it also includes the means of creation, circulation, and reuse of that discourse as well. 147 The on-demand, Internet-mediated book, by contrast, will have a much different temporality of circulation: it might languish in obscurity due to lack of marketing or reputable authority, or it might get mentioned somewhere like the New York Times and suddenly become a sensation. For such a book, copyright law (in the form of a copyleft license) might allow a much wider range of uses and reuses, but it will restrict certain forms of commercialization of the text. The two publics might therefore end up looking quite different, overlapping, to be sure, but varying in terms of their control [pg 50] and the terms of admittance. What is at stake is the power of one or the other such public to appear as an independent and sovereign entity—free from suspect constraints and control—whose function is to argue with other constituted forms of power. 148 The conventionally published book may well satisfy all the criteria of being a public, at least in the colloquial sense of making a set of ideas and a discourse widely available and expecting to influence, or receive a response from, constituted forms of sovereign power. However, it is only the latter "on-demand" scheme for publishing that satisfies the criteria of being a recursive public. The differences in this example offer a crude indication of why the Internet is so crucially important to geeks, so important that it draws them together, in its defense, as an infrastructure that enables the creation of publics that are thought to be autonomous, independent, and autotelic. Geeks share an idea of moral and technical order when it comes to the Internet; not only this, but they share a commitment to maintaining that order because it is what allows them to associate as a recursive public in the first place. They discover, or rediscover, through their association, the power and possibility of occupying the position of independent public—one not controlled by states, corporations, or other organizations, but open (they claim) through and through—and develop a desire to defend it from encroachment, destruction, or refeudalization (to use Habermas's term for the fragmentation of the public sphere). 149 The recursive public is thus not only the book and the discourse around the book. It is not even "content" expanded to include all kinds of media. It is also the technical structure of the Internet as well: its software, its protocols and standards, its applications and software, its legal status and the licenses and regulations that govern it. This captures both of the reasons why recursive publics are distinctive: (1) they include not only the discourses of a public, but the ability to make, maintain, and manipulate the infrastructures of those discourses as well; and (2) they are "layered" and include both discourses and infrastructures, to a specific technical extent (i.e., not all the way down). The meaning of which layers are important develops more or less immediately from direct engagement with the medium. In the following example, for instance, Napster represents the potential of the Internet in miniature—as an application—but it also connects immediately to concerns about the core protocols that govern the Internet and the process of standardization [pg 51] that governs the development of these protocols: hence recursion through the layers of an infrastructure. 150 These two aspects of the recursive public also relate to a concern about the fragmentation or refeudalization of the public sphere: there is only one Internet. Its singularity is not technically determined or by any means necessary, but it is what makes the Internet so valuable to geeks. It is a contest, the goal of which is to maintain the Internet as an infrastructure for autonomous and autotelic publics to emerge as part of The Public, understood as part of an imaginary of moral and technical order: operating systems and social systems. 151 From Napster to the Internet 152 On 27 July 2000 Eugen Leitl cross-posted to Silk-list a message with the subject line "Prelude to the Singularity." The message's original author, Jeff Bone (not at the time a member of Silk-list), had posted the "op-ed piece" initially to the FoRK mailing list as a response to the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) actions against Napster. The RIAA had just succeeded in getting U.S. district judge Marilyn Hall Patel, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, to issue an injunction to Napster to stop downloads of copyrighted music. Bone's op-ed said, 153 Popular folklore has it that the Internet was designed with decentralized routing protocols in order to withstand a nuclear attack. That is, the Internet "senses damage" and "routes around it." It has been said that, on the 'Net, censorship is perceived as damage and is subsequently routed around. The RIAA, in a sense, has cast itself in a censor's role. Consequently, the music industry will be perceived as damage—and it will be routed around. There is no doubt that this will happen, and that technology will evolve more quickly than businesses and social institutions can; there are numerous highly-visible projects already underway that attempt to create technology that is invulnerable to legal challenges of various kinds. Julian Morrison, the originator of a project (called Fling) to build a fully anonymous/untraceable suite of network protocols, expresses this particularly eloquently.46 46 The rest of this message can be found in the Silk-list archives at <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/2869> (accessed 18 August 2006). The reference to "Fling" is to a project now available at <http://fling.sourceforge.net/> (accessed 18 August 2006). The full archives of Silk-list can be found at <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/> and the full archives of the FoRK list can be found at <http://www.xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork/>. 154 Bone's message is replete with details that illustrate the meaning and value of the Internet to geeks, and that help clarify the concept [pg 52] of a recursive public. While it is only one message, it nonetheless condenses and expresses a variety of stories, images, folklore, and technical details that I elaborate herein. 155 The Napster shutdown in 2000 soured music fans and geeks alike, and it didn't really help the record labels who perpetrated it either. For many geeks, Napster represented the Internet in miniature, an innovation that both demonstrated something on a scope and scale never seen before, and that also connected people around something they cared deeply about—their shared interest in music. Napster raised interesting questions about its own success: Was it successful because it allowed people to develop new musical interests on a scope and scale they had never experienced before? Or was it successful because it gave people with already existing musical interests a way to share music on a scope and scale they had never experienced before? That is to say, was it an innovation in marketing or in distribution? The music industry experienced it as the latter and hence as direct competition with their own means of distribution. Many music fans experienced it as the former, what Cory Doctorow nicely labeled "risk-free grazing," meaning the ability to try out an almost unimaginable diversity of music before choosing what to invest one's interests (and money) in. To a large extent, Napster was therefore a recapitulation of what the Internet already meant to geeks. 156 Bone's message, the event of the Napster shutdown, and the various responses to it nicely illustrate the two key aspects of the recursive public: first, the way in which geeks argue not only about rights and ideas (e.g., is it legal to share music?) but also about the infrastructures that allow such arguing and sharing; second, the "layers" of a recursive public are evidenced in the immediate connection of Napster (an application familiar to millions) to the "decentralized routing protocols" (TCP/IP, DNS, and others) that made it possible for Napster to work the way it did. 157 Bone's message contains four interrelated points. The first concerns the concept of autonomous technical progress. The title "Prelude to the Singularity" refers to a 1993 article by Vernor Vinge about the notion of a "singularity," a point in time when the speed of autonomous technological development outstrips the human capacity to control it.47 The notion of singularity has the status of a kind of colloquial "law" similar to Moore's Law or Metcalfe's Law, as well as signaling links to a more general literature with roots in [pg 53] libertarian or classically liberal ideas of social order ranging from John Locke and John Stuart Mill to Ayn Rand and David Brin.48 47 Vinge, "The Coming Technological Singularity." 48 Moore's Law—named for Gordon Moore, former head of Intel—states that the speed and capacity of computer central processing units (CPUs) doubles every eighteen months, which it has done since roughly 1970. Metcalfe's Law—named for Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet—states that the utility of a network equals the square of the number of users, suggesting that the number of things one can do with a network increases exponentially as members are added linearly. 158 Bone's affinity for transhumanist stories of evolutionary theory, economic theory, and rapid innovation sets the stage for the rest of his message. The crucial rhetorical gambit here is the appeal to inevitability (as in the emphatic "there is no doubt that this will happen"): Bone establishes that he is speaking to an audience that is accustomed to hearing about the inevitability of technical progress and the impossibility of legal maneuvering to change it, but his audience may not necessarily agree with these assumptions. Geeks occupy a spectrum from "polymath" to "transhumanist," a spectrum that includes their understandings of technological progress and its relation to human intervention. Bone's message clearly lands on the far transhumanist side. 159 A second point concerns censorship and the locus of power: according to Bone, power does not primarily reside with the government or the church, but comes instead from the private sector, in this case the coalition of corporations represented by the RIAA. The significance of this has to do with the fact that a "public" is expected to be its own sovereign entity, distinct from church, state, or corporation, and while censorship by the church or the state is a familiar form of aggression against publics, censorship by corporations (or consortia representing them), as it strikes Bone and others, is a novel development. Whether the blocking of file-sharing can legitimately be called censorship is also controversial, and many Silk-list respondents found the accusation of censorship untenable. 160 Proving Bone's contention, over the course of the subsequent years and court cases, the RIAA and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have been given considerably more police authority than even many federal agencies—especially with regard to policing networks themselves (an issue which, given its technical abstruseness, has rarely been mentioned in the mainstream mass media). Both organizations have not only sought to prosecute filesharers but have been granted rights to obtain information from Internet Service Providers about customer activities and have consistently sought the right to secretly disable (hack into, disable, or destroy) private computers suspected of illegal activity. Even if these practices may not be defined as censorship per se, they are nonetheless fine examples of the issues that most exercise geeks: the use of legal means by a few (in this case, private corporations) to [pg 54] suppress or transform technologies in wide use by the many. They also index the problems of monopoly, antitrust, and technical control that are not obvious and often find expression, for example, in allegories of reformation and the control of the music-sharing laity by papal authorities. 161 Third, Bone's message can itself be understood in terms of the reorientation of knowledge and power. Although what it means to call his message an "op-ed" piece may seem obvious, Bone's message was not published anywhere in any conventional sense. It doesn't appear to have been widely cited or linked to. However, for one day at least, it was a heated discussion topic on three mailing lists, including Silk-list. "Publication" in this instance is a different kind of event than getting an op-ed in the New York Times. 162 The material on Silk-list rests somewhere between private conversation (in a public place, perhaps) and published opinion. No editor made a decision to "publish" the message—Bone just clicked "send." However, as with any print publication, his piece was theoretically accessible by anyone, and what's more, a potentially huge number of copies may be archived in many different places (the computers of all the participants, the server that hosts the list, the Yahoo! Groups servers that archive it, Google's search databases, etc.). Bone's message exemplifies the recursive nature of the recursive public: it is a public statement about the openness of the Internet, and it is an example of the new forms of publicness it makes possible through its openness. 163 The constraints on who speaks in a public sphere (such as the power of printers and publishers, the requirements of licensing, or issues of cost and accessibility) are much looser in the Internet era than in any previous one. The Internet gives a previously unknown Jeff Bone the power to dash off a manifesto without so much as a second thought. On the other hand, the ease of distribution belies the difficulty of actually being heard: the multitudes of other Jeff Bones make it much harder to get an audience. In terms of publics, Bone's message can constitute a public in the same sense that a New York Times op-ed can, but its impact and meaning will be different. His message is openly and freely available for as long as there are geeks and laws and machines that maintain it, but the New York Times piece will have more authority, will be less accessible, and, most important, will not be available to just anyone. Geeks imagine a space where anyone can speak with similar reach and staying [pg 55] power—even if that does not automatically imply authority—and they imagine that it should remain open at all costs. Bone is therefore interested precisely in a technical infrastructure that ensures his right to speak about that infrastructure and offer critique and guidance concerning it. 164 The ability to create and to maintain such a recursive public, however, raises the fourth and most substantial point that Bone's message makes clear. The leap to speaking about the "decentralized routing protocols" represents clearly the shared moral and technical order of geeks, derived in this case from the specific details of the Internet. Bone's post begins with a series of statements that are part of the common repertoire of technical stories and images among geeks. Bone begins by making reference to the "folklore" of the Internet, in which routing protocols are commonly believed to have been created to withstand a nuclear attack. In calling it folklore he suggests that this is not a precise description of the Internet, but an image that captures its design goals. Bone collapses it into a more recent bit of folklore: "The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it."49 Both bits of folklore are widely circulated and cited; they encapsulate one of the core intellectual ideas about the architecture of the Internet, that is, its open and distributed interconnectivity. There is certainly a specific technical backdrop for this suggestion: the TCP/IP "internetting" protocols were designed to link up multiple networks without making them sacrifice their autonomy and control. However, Bone uses this technical argument more in the manner of a social imaginary than of a theory, that is, as a way of thinking about the technical (and moral) order of the Internet, of what the Internet is supposed to be like. 49 This quotation from the 1990s is attributed to Electronic Frontier Foundation's founder and "cyber-libertarian" John Gilmore. Whether there [pg 319] is any truth to this widespread belief expressed in the statement is not clear. On the one hand, the protocol to which this folklore refers—the general system of "message switching" and, later, "packet switching" invented by Paul Baran at RAND Corporation—does seem to lend itself to robustness (on this history, see Abbate, Inventing the Internet). However, it is not clear that nuclear threats were the only reason such robustness was a design goal; simply to ensure communication in a distributed network was necessary in itself. Nonetheless, the story has great currency as a myth of the nature and structure of the Internet. Paul Edwards suggests that both stories are true ("Infrastructure and Modernity," 216-20, 225n13). 165 In the early 1990s this version of the technical order of the Internet was part of a vibrant libertarian dogma asserting that the Internet simply could not be governed by any land-based sovereign and that it was fundamentally a place of liberty and freedom. This was the central message of people such as John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore, Howard Rheingold, Esther Dyson, and a host of others who populated both the pre-1993 Internet (that is, before the World Wide Web became widely available) and the pages of magazines such as Wired and Mondo 2000—the same group of people, incidentally, whose ideas were visible and meaningful to Udhay Shankar and his friends in India even prior to Internet access there, not to mention to Sean and Adrian in Boston, and artists and activists in [pg 56] Europe, all of whom often reacted more strongly against this libertarian aesthetic. 166 For Jeff Bone (and a great many geeks), the folkloric notion that "the net treats censorship as damage" is a very powerful one: it suggests that censorship is impossible because there is no central point of control. A related and oft-cited sentiment is that "trying to take something off of the Internet is like trying to take pee out of a pool." This is perceived by geeks as a virtue, not a drawback, of the Internet. 167 For Jeff Bone (and a great many geeks), the folkloric notion that "the net treats censorship as damage" is a very powerful one: it suggests that censorship is impossible because there is no central point of control. A related and oft-cited sentiment is that "trying to take something off of the Internet is like trying to take pee out of a pool." This is perceived by geeks as a virtue, not a drawback, of the Internet. 168 On the other side of the spectrum, however, this view of the unregulatable nature of the Internet has been roundly criticized, most prominently by Lawrence Lessig, who is otherwise often in sympathy with geek culture. Lessig suggests that just because the Internet has a particular structure does not mean that it must always be that way.50 His argument has two prongs: first, that the Internet is structured the way it is because it is made of code that people write, and thus it could have been and will be otherwise, given that there are changes and innovations occurring all the time; second, that the particular structure of the Internet therefore governs or regulates behavior in particular ways: Code is Law. So while it may be true that no one can make the Internet "closed" by passing a law, it is also true that the Internet could become closed if the technology were to be altered for that purpose, a process that may well be nudged and guided by laws, regulations, and norms. 50 Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. See also Gillespie, "Engineering a Principle" on the related history of the "end to end" design principle. 169 Lessig's critique is actually at the heart of Bone's concern, and the concern of recursive publics generally: the Internet is a contest and one that needs to be repeatedly and constantly replayed in order to maintain it as the legitimate infrastructure through which geeks associate with one another. Geeks argue in detail about what distinguishes technical factors from legal or social ones. Openness on the Internet is complexly intertwined with issues of availability, price, legal restriction, usability, elegance of design, censorship, trade secrecy, and so on. [pg 57] 170 However, even where openness is presented as a natural tendency for technology (in oft-made analogies with reproductive fitness and biodiversity, for example), it is only a partial claim in that it represents only one of the "layers" of a recursive public. For instance, when Bone suggests that the net is "invulnerable to legal attack" because "technology will evolve more quickly than businesses and social institutions can," he is not only referring to the fact that the Internet's novel technical configuration has few central points of control, which makes it difficult for a single institution to control it, but also talking about the distributed, loosely connected networks of people who have the right to write and rewrite software and deal regularly with the underlying protocols of the Internet—in other words, of geeks themselves. 171 Many geeks, perhaps including Bone, discover the nature of this order by coming to understand how the Internet works—how it works technically, but also who created it and how. Some have come to this understanding through participation in Free Software (an exemplary "recursive public"), others through stories and technologies and projects and histories that illuminate the process of creating, growing, and evolving the Internet. The story of the process by which the Internet is standardized is perhaps the most well known: it is the story of the Internet Engineering Task Force and its Requests for Comments system. 172 Requests for Comments 173 For many geeks, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and its Requests for Comments (RFC) system exemplify key features of the moral and technical order they share, the "stories and practices" that make up a social imaginary, according to Charles Taylor. The IETF is a longstanding association of Internet engineers who try to help disseminate some of the core standards of the Internet through [pg 58] the RFC process. Membership is open to individuals, and the association has very little real control over the structure or growth of the Internet—only over the key process of Internet standardization. Its standards rarely have the kind of political legitimacy that one associates with international treaties and the standards bodies of Geneva, but they are nonetheless de facto legitimate. The RFC process is an unusual standards process that allows modifications to existing technologies to be made before the standard is finalized. Together Internet standards and the RFC process form the background of the Napster debate and of Jeff Bone's claims about "internet routing protocols." 174 A famous bit of Internet-governance folklore expresses succinctly the combination of moral and technical order that geeks share (attributed to IETF member David Clark): "We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code."51 This quote emphasizes the necessity of arguing with and through technology, the first aspect of a recursive public; the only argument that convinces is working code. If it works, then it can be implemented; if it is implemented, it will "route around" the legal damage done by the RIAA. The notion of "running code" is central to an understanding of the relationship between argumentby- technology and argument-by-talk for geeks. Very commonly, the response by geeks to people who argued about Napster that summer—and the courts' decisions regarding it—was to dismiss their complaints as mere talk. Many suggested that if Napster were shut down, thousands more programs like it would spring up in its wake. As one mailing-list participant, Ashish "Hash" Gulhati, put it, "It is precisely these totally unenforceable and mindless judicial decisions that will start to look like self-satisfied wanking when there's code out there which will make the laws worth less than the paper they're written on. When it comes to fighting this shit in a way that counts, everything that isn't code is just talk."52 51 This is constantly repeated on the Internet and attributed to David Clark, but no one really knows where or when he stated it. It appears in a 1997 interview of David Clark by Jonathan Zittrain, the transcript of which is available at <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/jzfallsem//trans/clark/> (accessed 18 August 2006). 52 Ashish "Hash" Gulhati, e-mail to Silk-list mailing list, 9 September 2000, <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/3125>. 175 Such powerful rhetoric often collapses the process itself, for someone has to write the code. It can even be somewhat paradoxical: there is a need to talk forcefully about the need for less talk and more code, as demonstrated by Eugen Leitl when I objected that Silk-listers were "just talking": "Of course we should talk. Did my last post consist of some kickass Python code adding sore-missed functionality to Mojonation? Nope. Just more meta-level waffle about the importance of waffling less, coding more. I lack the [pg 59] proper mental equipment upstairs for being a good coder, hence I attempt to corrupt young impressionable innocents into contributing to the cause. Unashamedly so. So sue me."53 53 Eugen Leitl, e-mail to Silk-list mailing list, 9 September 2000, <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/3127>. Python is a programming language. Mojonation was a very promising peer-to-peer application in 2000 that has since ceased to exist. 176 Eugen's flippancy reveals a recognition that there is a political component to coding, even if, in the end, talk disappears and only code remains. Though Eugen and others might like to adopt a rhetoric that suggests "it will just happen," in practice none of them really act that way. Rather, the activities of coding, writing software, or improving and diversifying the software that exists are not inevitable or automatic but have specific characteristics. They require time and "the proper mental equipment." The inevitability they refer to consists not in some fantasy of machine intelligence, but in a social imaginary shared by many people in loosely connected networks who spend all their free time building, downloading, hacking, testing, installing, patching, coding, arguing, blogging, and proselytizing—in short, creating a recursive public enabled by the Internet. 177 Jeff Bone's op-ed piece, which is typically enthusiastic about the inevitability of new technologies, still takes time to reference one of thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of projects as worthy of attention and support, a project called Fling, which is an attempt to rewrite the core protocols of the Internet.54 The goal of the project is to write a software implementation of these protocols with the explicit goal of making them "anonymous, untraceable, and untappable." Fling is not a corporation, a start-up, or a university research project (though some such projects are); it is only a Web site. The core protocols of the Internet, contained in the RFCs, are little more than documents describing how computers should interact with each other. They are standards, but of an unusual kind.55 Bone's leap from a discussion about Napster to one about the core protocols of the Internet is not unusual. It represents the second aspect of a recursive public: the importance of understanding the Internet as a set of "layers," each enabling the next and each requiring an openness that both prevents central control and leads to maximum creativity. 54 In particular, this project focuses on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and the Domain Name System (DNS). The first two have remained largely stable over the last thirty years, but the DNS system has been highly politicized (see Mueller, Ruling the Root). 55 On Internet standards, see Schmidt and Werle, Coordinating Technology; Abbate and Kahin, Standards Policy for Information Infrastructure. 178 RFCs have developed from an informal system of memos into a formal standardization process over the life of the Internet, as the IETF and the Internet Society (ISOC) have become more bureaucratic entities. The process of writing and maintaining these documents is particular to the Internet, precisely because the Internet [pg 60] is the kind of network experiment that facilitates the sharing of resources across administratively bounded networks. It is a process that has allowed all the experimenters to both share the network and to propose changes to it, in a common space. RFCs are primarily suggestions, not demands. They are "public domain" documents and thus available to everyone with access to the Internet. As David Clark's reference to "consensus and running code" demonstrates, the essential component of setting Internet standards is a good, working implementation of the protocols. Someone must write software that behaves in the ways specified by the RFC, which is, after all, only a document, not a piece of software. Different implementations of, for example, the TCP/IP protocol or the File Transfer Protocol (ftp) depend initially on individuals, groups, and/or corporations building them into an operating-system kernel or a piece of user software and subsequently on the existence of a large number of people using the same operating system or application. 179 In many cases, subsequent to an implementation that has been disseminated and adopted, the RFCs have been amended to reflect these working implementations and to ordain them as standards. So the current standards are actually bootstrapped, through a process of writing RFCs, followed by a process of creating implementations that adhere loosely to the rules in the RFC, then observing the progress of implementations, and then rewriting RFCs so that the process begins all over again. The fact that geeks can have a discussion via e-mail depends on the very existence of both an RFC to define the e-mail protocol and implementations of software to send the e-mails. 180 This standardization process essentially inverts the process of planning. Instead of planning a system, which is then standardized, refined, and finally built according to specification, the RFC process allows plans to be proposed, implemented, refined, reproposed, rebuilt, and so on until they are adopted by users and become the standard approved of by the IETF. The implication for most geeks is that this process is permanently and fundamentally open: changes to it can be proposed, implemented, and adopted without end, and the better a technology becomes, the more difficult it becomes to improve on it, and therefore the less reason there is to subvert it or reinvent it. Counterexamples, in which a standard emerges but no one adopts it, are also plentiful, and they suggest that the standardization process extends beyond the proposal-implementation-proposal-standard [pg 61] circle to include the problem of actually convincing users to switch from one working technology to a better one. However, such failures of adoption are also seen as a kind of confirmation of the quality or ease of use of the current solution, and they are all the more likely to be resisted when some organization or political entity tries to force users to switch to the new standard—something the IETF has refrained from doing for the most part. 181 Conclusion: Recursive Public 182 Napster was a familiar and widely discussed instance of the "reorientation of power and knowledge" (or in this case, power and music) wrought by the Internet and the practices of geeks. Napster was not, however, a recursive public or a Free Software project, but a dot-com-inspired business plan in which proprietary software was given away for free in the hopes that revenue would flow from the stock market, from advertising, or from enhanced versions of the software. Therefore, geeks did not defend Napster as much as they experienced its legal restriction as a wake-up call: the Internet enables Napster and will enable many other things, but laws, corporations, lobbyists, money, and governments can destroy all of it. 183 I started this chapter by asking what draws geeks together: what constitutes the chain that binds geeks like Sean and Adrian to hipsters in Berlin and to entrepreneurs and programmers in Bangalore? What constitutes their affinity if it is not any of the conventional candidates like culture, nation, corporation, or language? A colloquial answer might be that it is simply the Internet that brings them together: cyberspace, virtual communities, online culture. But this doesn't answer the question of why? Because they can? Because Community Is Good? If mere association is the goal, why not AOL or a vast private network provided by Microsoft? 184 My answer, by contrast, is that geeks' affinity with one another is structured by shared moral and technical understandings of order. They are a public, an independent public that has the ability to build, maintain, and modify itself, that is not restricted to the activities of speaking, writing, arguing, or protesting. Recursive publics form through their experience with the Internet precisely because the Internet is the kind of thing they can inhabit and transform. Two [pg 62] things make recursive publics distinctive: the ability to include the practice of creating this infrastructure as part of the activity of being public or contesting control; and the ability to "recurse" through the layers of that infrastructure, maintaining its publicness at each level without making it into an unchanging, static, unmodifiable thing. 185 The affinity constituted by a recursive public, through the medium of the Internet, creates geeks who understand clearly what association through the Internet means. This affinity structures their imagination of what the Internet is and enables: creation, distribution, modification of knowledge, music, science, software. The infrastructure—this-infrastructure-here, the Internet—must be understood as part of this imaginary (in addition to being a pulsating tangle of computers, wires, waves, and electrons). 186 The Internet is not the only medium for such association. A corporation, for example, is also based on a shared imaginary of the economy, of how markets, exchanges, and business cycles are supposed to work; it is the creation of a concrete set of relations and practices, one that is generally inflexible—even in this age of socalled flexible capitalism—because it requires a commitment of time, humans, and capital. Even in fast capitalism one needs to rent office space, buy toilet paper, install payroll software, and so on. 187 The Internet is not the only medium for such association. A corporation, for example, is also based on a shared imaginary of the economy, of how markets, exchanges, and business cycles are supposed to work; it is the creation of a concrete set of relations and practices, one that is generally inflexible—even in this age of socalled flexible capitalism—because it requires a commitment of time, humans, and capital. Even in fast capitalism one needs to rent office space, buy toilet paper, install payroll software, and so on. 188 The urgency evidenced in the case of Napster (and repeated in numerous other instances, such as the debate over net neutrality) is linked to a moral idea of order in which there is a shared imaginary[pg 63] of The Public, and not only a vast multiplicity of competing publics. It is an urgency linked directly to the fact that the Internet provides geeks with a platform, an environment, an infrastructure through which they not only associate, but create, and do so in a manner that is widely felt to be autonomous, autotelic, and independent of at least the most conventional forms of power: states and corporations—independent enough, in fact, that both states and corporations can make widespread use of this infrastructure (can become geeks themselves) without necessarily endangering its independence. 189 2. Protestant Reformers, Polymaths, Transhumanists 190 Geeks talk a lot. They don't talk about recursive publics. They don't often talk about imaginations, infrastructures, moral or technical orders. But they do talk a lot. A great deal of time and typing is necessary to create software and networks: learning and talking, teaching and arguing, telling stories and reading polemics, reflecting on the world in and about the infrastructure one inhabits. In this chapter I linger on the stories geeks tell, and especially on stories and reflections that mark out contemporary problems of knowledge and power—stories about grand issues like progress, enlightenment, liberty, and freedom. 191 Issues of enlightenment, progress, and freedom are quite obviously still part of a "social imaginary," especially imaginations of the relationship of knowledge and enlightenment to freedom and autonomy so clearly at stake in the notion of a public or public [pg 65] sphere. And while the example of Free Software illuminates how issues of enlightenment, progress, and freedom are proposed, contested, and implemented in and through software and networks, this chapter contains stories that are better understood as "usable pasts"—less technical and more accessible narratives that make sense of the contemporary world by reflecting on the past and its difference from today. 192 Usable pasts is a more charitable term for what might be called modern myths among geeks: stories that the tellers know to be a combination of fact and fiction. They are told not in order to remember the past, but in order to make sense of the present and of the future. They make sense of practices that are not questioned in the doing, but which are not easily understood in available intellectual or colloquial terms. The first set of stories I relate are those about the Protestant Reformation: allegories that make use of Catholic and Protestant churches, laity, clergy, high priests, and reformation-era images of control and liberation. It might be surprising that geeks turn to the past (and especially to religious allegory) in order to make sense of the present, but the reason is quite simple: there are no "ready-to-narrate" stories that make sense of the practices of geeks today. Precisely because geeks are "figuring out" things that are not clear or obvious, they are of necessity bereft of effective ways of talking about it. The Protestant Reformation makes for good allegory because it separates power from control; it draws on stories of catechism and ritual, alphabets, pamphlets and liturgies, indulgences and self-help in order to give geeks a way to make sense of the distinction between power and control, and how it relates to the technical and political economy they occupy. The contemporary relationship among states, corporations, small businesses, and geeks is not captured by familiar oppositions like commercial/noncommercial, for/against private property, or capitalist/socialist—it is a relationship of reform and conversion, not revolution or overthrow. 193 Usable pasts are stories, but they are stories that reflect specific attitudes and specific ways of thinking about the relationship between past, present, and future. Geeks think and talk a lot about time, progress, and change, but their conclusions and attitudes are by no means uniform. Some geeks are much more aware of the specific historical circumstances and contexts in which they operate, others less so. In this chapter I pose a question via Michel [pg 66] Foucault's famous short piece "What Is Enlightenment?" Namely, are geeks modern? For Foucault, rereading Kant's eponymous piece from 1784, the problem of being modern (or of an age being "enlightened") is not one of a period or epoch that people live through; rather, it involves a subjective relationship, an attitude. Kant's explanation of enlightenment does not suggest that it is itself a universal, but that it occurs through a form of reflection on what difference the changes of one's immediate historical past make to one's understanding of the supposed universals of a much longer history—that is, one must ask why it is necessary to think the way one does today about problems that have been confronted in ages past. For Foucault, such reflections must be rooted in the "historically unique forms in which the generalities of our relations . . . have been problematized."56 Thus, I want to ask of geeks, how do they connect the historically unique problems they confront—from the Internet to Napster to intellectual property to sharing and reusing source code—to the generalities of relations in which they narrate them as problems of liberty, knowledge, power, and enlightenment? Or, as Foucault puts it, are they modern in this sense? Do they "despise the present" or not? 56 Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment," 319. 194 The attitudes that geeks take in responding to these questions fall along a spectrum that I have identified as ranging from "polymaths" to "transhumanists." These monikers are drawn from real discussions with geeks, but they don't designate a kind of person. They are "subroutines," perhaps, called from within a larger program of moral and technical imaginations of order. It is possible for the same person to be a polymath at work and a transhumanist at home, but generally speaking they are conflicting and opposite mantles. In polymath routines, technology is an intervention into a complicated, historically unique field of people, customs, organizations, other technologies, and laws; in transhumanist routines, technology is seen as an inevitable force—a product of human action, but not of human design—that is impossible to control or resist through legal or customary means. 195 Protestant Reformation 196 Geeks love allegories about the Protestant Reformation; they relish stories of Luther and Calvin, of popery and iconoclasm, of reformation [pg 67] over revolution. Allegories of Protestant revolt allow geeks to make sense of the relationship between the state (the monarchy), large corporations (the Catholic Church), the small start-ups, individual programmers, and adepts among whom they spend most of their time (Protestant reformers), and the laity (known as "lusers" and "sheeple"). It gives them a way to assert that they prefer reformation (to save capitalism from the capitalists) over revolution. Obviously, not all geeks tell stories of "religious wars" and the Protestant Reformation, but these images reappear often enough in conversations that most geeks will more or less instantly recognize them as a way of making sense of modern corporate, state, and political power in the arena of information technology: the figures of Pope, the Catholic Church, the Vatican, the monarchs of various nations, the laity, the rebel adepts like Luther and Calvin, as well as models of sectarianism, iconoclasm ("In the beginning was the Command Line"), politicoreligious power, and arcane theological argumentation.57 The allegories that unfold provide geeks a way to make sense of a similarly complex modern situation in which it is not the Church and the State that struggle, but the Corporation and the State; and what geeks struggle over are not matters of church doctrine and organization, but matters of information technology and its organization as intellectual property and economic motor. I stress here that this is not an analogy that I myself am making (though I happily make use of it), but is one that is in wide circulation among the geeks I study. To the historian or religious critic, it may seem incomplete, or absurd, or bizarre, but it still serves a specific function, and this is why I highlight it as one component of the practical and technical ideas of order that geeks share. 57 Stephenson, In the Beginning Was the Command Line. 197 At the first level are allegories of "religious war" or "holy war" (and increasingly, of "jihads"). Such stories reveal a certain cynicism: they describe a technical war of details between two pieces of software that accomplish the same thing through different means, so devotion to one or the other is seen as a kind of arbitrary theological commitment, at once reliant on a pure rationality and requiring aesthetic or political judgment. Such stories imply that two technologies are equally good and equally bad and that one's choice of sect is thus an entirely nonrational one based in the vicissitudes of background and belief. Some people are zealous proselytizers of a technology, some are not. As one Usenet message explains: "Religious ‘ wars' have tended to occur over theological and doctrinal [pg 68] technicalities of one sort or another. The parallels between that and the computing technicalities that result in ‘ computing wars' are pretty strong."58 58 Message-ID: tht55.221960$701.2930569@news4.giganews.com. 198 Perhaps the most familiar and famous of these wars is that between Apple and Microsoft (formerly between Apple and IBM), a conflict that is often played out in dramatic and broad strokes that imply fundamental differences, when in fact the differences are extremely slight.59 Geeks are also familiar with a wealth of less well-known "holy wars": EMACS versus vi; KDE versus Gnome; Linux versus BSD; Oracle versus all other databases.60 59 The Apple-Microsoft conflict was given memorable expression by Umberto Eco in a widely read piece that compared the Apple user interface [pg 320] to Catholicism and the PC user interface to Protestantism ("La bustina di Minerva," Espresso, 30 September 1994, back page). 60 One entry on Wikipedia differentiates religious wars from run-of-the-mill "flame wars" as follows: "Whereas a flame war is usually a particular spate of flaming against a non-flamy background, a holy war is a drawn-out disagreement that may last years or even span careers" ("Flaming [Internet]," <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_war> [accessed 16 January 2006]). 199 Often the language of the Reformation creeps playfully into otherwise serious attempts to make aesthetic judgments about technology, as in this analysis of the programming language tcl/tk: 200 It's also not clear that the primary design criterion in tcl, perl, or Visual BASIC was visual beauty—nor, probably, should it have been. Ousterhout said people will vote with their feet. This is important. While the High Priests in their Ivory Towers design pristine languages of stark beauty and balanced perfection for their own appreciation, the rest of the mundane world will in blind and contented ignorance go plodding along using nasty little languages like those enumerated above. These poor sots will be getting a great deal of work done, putting bread on the table for their kids, and getting home at night to share it with them. The difference is that the priests will shake their fingers at the laity, and the laity won't care, because they'll be in bed asleep.61 61 Message-ID: 369tva$8l0@csnews.cs.colorado.edu. 201 In this instance, the "religious war" concerns the difference between academic programming languages and regular programmers made equivalent to a distinction between the insularity of the Catholic Church and the self-help of a protestant laity: the heroes (such as tcl/tk, perl, and python—all Free Software) are the "nasty little languages" of the laity; the High Priests design (presumably) Algol, LISP, and other "academic" languages. 202 At a second level, however, the allegory makes precise use of Protestant Reformation details. For example, in a discussion about the various fights over the Gnu C Compiler (gcc), a central component of the various UNIX operating systems, Christopher Browne posted this counter-reformation allegory to a Usenet group. 203 The EGCS project was started around two years ago when G++ (and GCC) development got pretty "stuck." EGCS sought to integrate together [pg 69] a number of the groups of patches that people were making to the GCC "family." In effect, there had been a "Protestant Reformation," with split-offs of: 204 a) The GNU FORTRAN Denomination; 205 b) The Pentium Tuning Sect; 206 c) The IBM Haifa Instruction Scheduler Denomination; 207 d) The C++ Standard Acolytes. 208 These groups had been unable to integrate their efforts (for various reasons) with the Catholic Version, GCC 2.8. The Ecumenical GNU Compiler Society sought to draw these groups back into the Catholic flock. The project was fairly successful; GCC 2.8 was succeeded by GCC 2.9, which was not a direct upgrade from 2.8, but rather the results of the EGCS project. EGCS is now GCC.62 62 Message-ID: c1dz4.145472$mb.2669517@news6.giganews.com. It should be noted, in case the reader is unsure how serious this is, that EGCS stood for Extended GNU Compiler System, not Ecumenical GNU Compiler Society. 209 In addition to the obvious pleasure with which they deploy the sectarian aspects of the Protestant Reformation, geeks also allow themselves to see their struggles as those of Luther-like adepts, confronted by powerful worldly institutions that are distinct but intertwined: the Catholic Church and absolutist monarchs. Sometimes these comparisons are meant to mock theological argument; sometimes they are more straightforwardly hagiographic. For instance, a 1998 article in Salon compares Martin Luther and Linus Torvalds (originator of the Linux kernel). 210 In Luther's Day, the Roman Catholic Church had a near-monopoly on the cultural, intellectual and spiritual life of Europe. But the principal source text informing that life—the Bible—was off limits to ordinary people. . . . Linus Torvalds is an information-age reformer cut from the same cloth. Like Luther, his journey began while studying for ordination into the modern priesthood of computer scientists at the University of Helsinki—far from the seats of power in Redmond and Silicon Valley. Also like Luther, he had a divine, slightly nutty idea to remove the intervening bureaucracies and put ordinary folks in a direct relationship to a higher power—in this case, their computers. Dissolving the programmer-user distinction, he encouraged ordinary people to participate in the development of their computing environment. And just as Luther sought to make the entire sacramental shebang—the wine, the bread and the translated Word—available to the hoi polloi, Linus seeks to revoke the developer's proprietary access to the OS, insisting that the full operating system source code be delivered—without cost—to every ordinary Joe at the desktop.63 [pg 70] 63 "Martin Luther, Meet Linus Torvalds," Salon, 12 November 1998, <http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/11/12feature.html> (accessed 5 February 2005). 211 Adepts with strong convictions—monks and priests whose initiation and mastery are evident—make the allegory work. Other uses of Christian iconography are less, so to speak, faithful to the sources. Another prominent personality, Richard Stallman, of the Free Software Foundation, is prone to dressing as his alter-ego, St. IGNUcius, patron saint of the church of EMACS—a church with no god, but intense devotion to a baroque text-processing program of undeniable, nigh-miraculous power.64 64 See <http://www.stallman.org/saint.html> (accessed 5 February 2005) and <http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/religion/> (accessed 5 February 2005). On EMACS, see chapter 6. 212 Often the appeal of Reformation-era rhetoric comes from a kind of indictment of the present: despite all this high tech, super-fabulous computronic wonderfulness, we are no less feudal, no less violent, no less arbitrary and undemocratic; which is to say, geeks have progressed, have seen the light and the way, but the rest of society—and especially management and marketing—have not. In this sense, Reformation allegories are stories of how "things never change." 213 But the most compelling use of the Protestant Reformation as usable past comes in the more detailed understandings geeks have of the political economy of information technology. The allegorization of the Catholic Church with Microsoft, for instance, is a frequent component, as in this brief message regarding start-up key combinations in the Be operating system: "These secret handshakes are intended to reinforce a cabalistic high priesthood and should not have been disclosed to the laity. Forget you ever saw this post and go by [sic] something from Microsoft."65 65 Message-ID: 6ms27l$6e1@bgtnsc01.worldnet.att.net. In one very humorous case the comparison is literalized "Microsoft acquires Catholic Church" (Message-ID: <gaijin-870804300-dragonwing@sec.lia.net>). 214 More generally, large corporations like IBM, Oracle, or Microsoft are made to stand in for Catholicism, while bureaucratic congresses and parliaments with their lobbyists take on the role of absolutist monarchs and their cronies. Geeks can then see themselves as fighting to uphold Christianity (true capitalism) against the church (corporations) and to be reforming a way of life that is corrupted by church and monarchs, instead of overthrowing through revolution a system they believe to be flawed. There is a historically and technically specific component of this political economy in which it is in the interest of corporations like IBM and Microsoft to keep users "locked as securely to Big Blue as an manacled wretch in a medieval dungeon."66 66 Paul Fusco, "The Gospel According to Joy," New York Times, 27 March 1988, Sunday Magazine, 28. 215 Such stories appeal because they bypass the language of modern American politics (liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican) in which there are only two sides to any issue. They also bypass an [pg 71] argument between capitalism and socialism, in which if you are not pro-capitalism you must be a communist. They are stories that allow the more pragmatist of the geeks to engage in intervention and reformation, rather than revolution. Though I've rarely heard it articulated so bluntly, the allegory often implies that one must "save capitalism from the capitalists," a sentiment that implies at least some kind of human control over capitalism. 216 In fact, the allegorical use of the Reformation and the church generates all kinds of clever comparisons. A typical description of such comparisons might go like this: the Catholic Church stands in for large, publicly traded corporations, especially those controlling large amounts of intellectual property (the granting of which might roughly be equated with the ceremonies of communion and confession) for which they depend on the assistance and support of national governments. Naturally, it is the storied excesses of the church—indulgences, liturgical complexity, ritualistic ceremony, and corruption—which make for easy allegory. Modern corporations can be figured as a small, elite papal body with theologians (executives and their lawyers, boards of directors and their lawyers), who command a much larger clergy (employees), who serve a laity (consumers) largely imagined to be sinful (underspending on music and movies—indeed, even "stealing" them) and thus in need of elaborate and ritualistic cleansing (advertising and lawsuits) by the church. Access to grace (the American Dream) is mediated only by the church and is given form through the holy acts of shopping and home improvement. The executives preach messages of damnation to the government, messages most government officials are all too willing to hear: do not tamper with our market share, do not affect our pricing, do not limit our ability to expand these markets. The executives also offer unaccountable promises of salvation in the guise of deregulation and the American version of "reform"—the demolition of state and national social services. Government officials in turn have developed their own "divine right of kings," which justifies certain forms of manipulation (once called "elections") of succession. Indulgences are sold left and right by lobbyists or industry associations, and the decrees of the papacy evidence little but full disconnection from the miserable everyday existence of the flock. 217 In fact, it is remarkable how easy such comparisons become the more details of the political economy of information one learns. But [pg 72] allegories of the Reformation and clerical power can lead easily to cynicism, which should perhaps be read in this instance as evidence of political disenfranchisement, rather than a lapse in faith. And yet the usable pasts of these reformation-minded modern monks and priests crop up regularly not only because they provide relief from technical chatter but because they explain a political, technical, legal situation that does not have ready-to-narrate stories. Geeks live in a world finely controlled by corporate organizations, mass media, marketing departments, and lobbyists, yet they share a profound distrust of government regulation—they need another set of just-so stories to make sense of it. The standard unusable pasts of the freeing of markets, the inevitability of capitalism and democracy, or more lately, the necessity of security don't do justice to their experience. 218 Allegories of Reformation are stories that make sense of the political economy of information. But they also have a more precise use: to make sense of the distinction between power and control. Because geeks are "closer to the machine" than the rest of the laity, one might reasonably expect them to be the ones in power. This is clearly not the case, however, and it is the frustrations and mysteries by which states, corporations, and individuals manipulate technical details in order to shift power that often earns the deepest ire of geeks. Control, therefore, includes the detailed methods and actual practices by which corporations, government agencies, or individuals attempt to manipulate people (or enroll them to manipulate themselves and others) into making technical choices that serve power, rather than rationality, liberty, elegance, or any other geekly concern. 219 Consider the subject of evil. During my conversations with Sean Doyle in the late 1990s, as well as with a number of other geeks, the term evil was regularly used to refer to some kind of design or technical problem. I asked Sean what he meant. 220 SD: [Evil is] just a term I use to say that something's wrong, but usually it means something is wrong on purpose, there was agency behind it. I can't remember [the example you gave] but I think it may have been some GE equipment, where it has this default where it likes to send things in its own private format rather than in DICOM [the radiology industry standard for digital images], if you give it a choice. I don't know why they would have done something like that, [pg 73] it doesn't solve any backward compatibility problem, it's really just an exclusionary sort of thing. So I guess there's Evil like that. . . . 221 CK: one of the other examples that you had . . . was something with Internet Explorer 3.0? 222 SD: Yes, oh yes, there are so many things with IE3 that are completely Evil. Like here's one of them: in the http protocol there's a thing called the "user agent field" where a browser announces to the server who it is. If you look at IE, it announces that it is Mozilla, which is the [code-name for] Netscape. Why did they do this? Well because a lot of the web servers were sending out certain code that said, if it were Mozilla they would serve the stuff down, [if not] they would send out something very simple or stupid that would look very ugly. But it turned out that [IE3, or maybe IE2] didn't support things when it first came out. Like, I don't think they supported tables, and later on, their versions of Javascript were so different that there was no way it was compatible—it just added tremendous complexity. It was just a way of pissing on the Internet and saying there's no law that says we have to follow these Internet standards. We can do as we damn well please, and we're so big that you can't stop us. So I view it as Evil in that way. I mean they obviously have the talent to do it. They obviously have the resources to do it. They've obviously done the work, it's just that they'll have this little twitch where they won't support a certain MIME type or they'll support some things differently than others. 223 CK: But these kinds of incompatibility issues can happen as a result of a lack of communication or coordination, which might involve agency at some level, right? 224 SD: Well, I think of that more as Stupidity than Evil [laughter]. No, Evil is when there is an opportunity to do something, and an understanding that there is an opportunity to, and resources and all that—and then you do something just to spite the other person. You know I'm sure it's like in messy divorces, where you would rather sell the property at half its value rather than have it go to the other person. 225 Sean relates control to power by casting the decisions of a large corporation in a moral light. Although the specific allegory of the Protestant Reformation does not operate here, the details do. Microsoft's decision to manipulate Internet Explorer's behavior stems not from a lack of technical sophistication, nor is it an "accident" of [pg 74] complexity, according to Sean, but is a deliberate assertion of economic and political power to corrupt the very details by which software has been created and standardized and is expected to function. The clear goal of this activity is conversion, the expansion of Microsoft's flock through a detailed control of the beliefs and practices (browsers and functionality) of computer users. Calling Microsoft "Evil" in this way has much the same meaning as questioning the Catholic Church's use of ritual, ceremony, literacy, and history—the details of the "implementation" of religion, so to speak. 226 Or, in the terms of the Protestant Reformation itself, the practices of conversion as well as those of liberation, learning, and self-help are central to the story. It is not an accident that many historians of the Reformation themselves draw attention to the promises of liberation through reformation "information technologies."67 Colloquial (and often academic) assertions that the printing press was technologically necessary or sufficient to bring the Reformation about appear constantly as a parable of this new age of information. Often the printing press is the only "technological" cause considered, but scholars of the real, historical Reformation also pay close attention to the fact of widespread literacy, to circulating devotional pamphlets, catechisms, and theological tracts, as well as to the range of transformations of political and legal relationships that occurred simultaneously with the introduction of the printing press. 67 See, for example, Matheson, The Imaginative World of the Reformation. There is rigorous debate about the relation of print, religion, and capitalism: one locus classicus is Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, which was inspired by McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy. See also Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England and The Christian's ABCs; Chadwick, The Early Reformation on the Continent, chaps. 1-3. 227 ✠ © 228 One final way to demonstrate the effectiveness of these allegories—their ability to work on the minds of geeks—is to demonstrate how they have started to work on me, to demonstrate how much of a geek I have become—a form of participant allegorization, so to speak. The longer one considers the problems that make up the contemporary political economy of information technology that geeks inhabit, the more likely it is that these allegories will start to present themselves almost automatically—as, for instance, when I read The Story of A, a delightful book having nothing to do with geeks, a book about literacy in early America. The author, Patricia Crain, explains that the Christ's cross (see above) was often used in the creation of hornbooks or battledores, small leather-backed paddles inscribed with the Lord's Prayer and the alphabet, which were used [pg 75] to teach children their ABCs from as early as the fifteenth century until as late as the nineteenth: "In its early print manifestations, the pedagogical alphabet is headed not by the letter A but by the ‘ Christ's Cross': ✠ . . . . Because the alphabet is associated with Catholic Iconography, as if the two sets of signs were really part of one semiological system, one of the struggles of the Reformation would be to wrest the alphabet away from the Catholic Church."68 68 Crain, The Story of A, 16-17. 229 Here, allegorically, the Catholic Church's control of the alphabet (like Microsoft's programming of Internet Explorer to blur public standards for the Internet) is not simply ideological; it is not just a fantasy of origin or ownership planted in the fallow mental soil of believers, but in fact a very specific, very nonsubjective, and very media-specific normative tool of control. Crain explains further: "Today ✠ represents the imprimatur of the Catholic Church on copyright pages. In its connection to the early modern alphabet as well, this cross carries an imprimatur or licensing effect. This ‘ let it be printed,' however, is directed not to the artisan printer but to the mind and memory of the young scholar. . . . Like modern copyright, the cross authorizes the existence of the alphabet and associates the letters with sacred authorship, especially since another long-lived function of ✠ in liturgical missals is to mark gospel passages. The symbol both conveys information and generates ritual behavior."69 69 Ibid., 20-21. 230 The © today carries as much if not more power, both ideologically and legally, as the cross of the Catholic church. It is the very symbol of authorship, even though in origin and in function it governs only ownership and rights. Magical thinking about copyright abounds, but one important function of the symbol © , if not its legal implications, is to achieve the same thing as the Christ's cross: to associate in the mind of the reader the ownership of a particular text (or in this case, piece of software) with a particular organization or person. Furthermore, even though the symbol is an artifact of national and international law, it creates an association not between a text and the state or government, but between a text and particular corporations, publishers, printers, or authors. 231 Like the Christ's cross, the copyright symbol carries both a licensing effect (exclusive, limited or nonexclusive) and an imprimatur on the minds of people: "let it be imprinted in memory" that this is the work of such and such an author and that this is the property of such and such a corporation. 232 Without the allegory of the Protestant Reformation, the only available narrative for such evil—whether it be the behavior of Microsoft or of some other corporation—is that corporations are "competing in the marketplace according to the rules of capitalism" and thus when geeks decry such behavior, it's just sour grapes. If corporations are not breaking any laws, why shouldn't they be allowed to achieve control in this manner? In this narrative there is no room for a moral evaluation of competition—anything goes, it would seem. Claiming for Microsoft that it is simply playing by the rules of capitalism puts everyone else into either the competitor box or the noncompetitor box (the state and other noncompetitive organizations). Using the allegory of the Protestant Reformation, on the other hand, gives geeks a way to make sense of an unequal distribution among competing powers—between large and small corporations, and between market power and the details of control. It provides an alternate imagination against which to judge the technically and legally specific actions that corporations and individuals take, and to imagine forms of justified action in return. 233 Without such an allegory, geeks who oppose Microsoft are generally forced into the position of being anticapitalist or are forced to adopt the stance that all standards should be publicly generated and controlled, a position few wish to take. Indeed, many geeks would prefer a different kind of imaginary altogether—a recursive public, perhaps. Instead of an infrastructure subject to unequal distributions of power and shot through with "evil" distortions of technical control, there is, as geeks see it, the possibility for a "self-leveling" level playing field, an autotelic system of rules, both technical and legal, by which all participants are expected to compete equally. Even if it remains an imaginary, the allegory of the Protestant Reformation makes sense of (gives order to) the political economy of the contemporary information-technology world and allows geeks to conceive of their interests and actions according to a narrative of reformation, rather than one of revolution or submission. In the Reformation the interpretation or truth of Christian teaching was not primarily in question: it was not a doctrinal revolution, but a bureaucratic one. Likewise, geeks do not question the rightness of networks, software, or protocols and standards, nor are they against capitalism or intellectual property, but they do wish to maintain a space for critique and the moral evaluation of contemporary capitalism and competition. 234 Polymaths and Transhumanists 235 Usable pasts articulate the conjunction of "operating systems and social systems," giving narrative form to imaginations of moral and technical order. To say that there are no ready-to-narrate stories about contemporary political economy means only that the standard colloquial explanations of the state of the modern world do not do justice to the kinds of moral and technical imaginations of order that geeks possess by virtue of their practices. Geeks live in, and build, one kind of world—a world of software, networks, and infrastructures—but they are often confronted with stories and explanations that simply don't match up with their experience, whether in newspapers and on television, or among nongeek friends. To many geeks, proselytization seems an obvious route: why not help friends and neighbors to understand the hidden world of networks and software, since, they are quite certain, it will come to structure their lives as well? 236 Geeks gather through the Internet and, like a self-governing people, possess nascent ideas of independence, contract, and constitution by which they wish to govern themselves and resist governance by others.70 Conventional political philosophies like libertarianism, anarchism, and (neo)liberalism only partially capture these social imaginaries precisely because they make no reference to the operating systems, software, and networks within which geeks live, work, and in turn seek to build and extend. 70 At a populist level, this was captured by John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of Independence of the Internet," <http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html>. 237 Geeks live in specific ways in time and space. They are not just users of technology, or a "network society," or a "virtual community," but embodied and imagining actors whose affinity for one another is enabled in new ways by the tools and technologies they have such deep affective connections to. They live in this-network-here, a historically unique form grounded in particular social, moral, national, and historical specificities which nonetheless relates to generalities such as progress, technology, infrastructure, and liberty. Geeks are by no means of one mind about such generalities though, and they often have highly developed means of thinking about them. 238 Foucault's article "What Is Enlightenment?" captures part of this problematic. For Foucault, Kant's understanding of modernity was an attempt to rethink the relationship between the passage of historical time and the subjective relationship that individuals have toward it. 239 Thinking back on Kant's text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity as an attitude rather than as a period of history. And by "attitude," I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. No doubt a bit like what the Greeks called an ethos. And consequently, rather than seeking to distinguish the "modern era" from the "premodern" or "postmodern," I think it would be more useful to try to find out how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found itself struggling with attitudes of "countermodernity."71 71 Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment," 309-10. 240 In thinking through how geeks understand the present, the past, and the future, I pose the question of whether they are "modern" in this sense. Foucault makes use of Baudelaire as his foil for explaining in what the attitude of modernity consists: "For [Baudelaire,] being modern . . . consists in recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the present, or behind it, but within it."72 He suggests that Baudelaire's understanding of modernity is "an attitude that makes it possible to grasp the ‘ heroic' aspect of the present moment . . . the will to ‘ heroize' the present."73 Heroic here means something like redescribing the seemingly fleeting events of the present in terms that conjure forth the universal or eternal character that animates them. In Foucault's channeling of Baudelaire such an attitude is incommensurable with one that sees in the passage of the present into the future some version of autonomous progress (whether absolute spirit or decadent degeneration), and the tag he uses for this is "you have no right to despise the present." To be modern is to confront the present as a problem that can be transformed by human action, not as an inevitable outcome of processes beyond the scope of individual or collective human control, that is, "attitudes of counter-modernity." When geeks tell stories of the past to make sense of the future, it is often precisely in order to "heroize" the present in this sense—but not all geeks do so. Within the spectrum from polymath to transhumanist, there are attitudes of both modernity and countermodernity. 72 Ibid., 310. 73 Ibid., 310. 241 The questions I raise here are also those of politics in a classical sense: Are the geeks I discuss bound by an attitude toward the present that concerns such things as the relationship of the public to the private and the social (à la Hannah Arendt), the relationship [pg 79] of economics to liberty (à la John Stuart Mill and John Dewey), or the possibilities for rational organization of society through the application of scientific knowledge (à la Friedrich Hayek or Foucault)? Are geeks "enlightened"? Are they Enlightenment rationalists? What might this mean so long after the Enlightenment and its vigorous, wide-ranging critiques? How is their enlightenment related to the technical and infrastructural commitments they have made? Or, to put it differently, what makes enlightenment newly necessary now, in the milieu of the Internet, Free Software, and recursive publics? What kinds of relationships become apparent when one asks how these geeks relate their own conscious appreciation of the history and politics of their time to their everyday practices and commitments? Do geeks despise the present? 242 Polymaths and transhumanists speak differently about concepts like technology, infrastructure, networks, and software, and they have different ideas about their temporality and relationship to progress and liberty. Some geeks see technology as one kind of intervention into a constituted field of organizations, money, politics, and people. Some see it as an autonomous force made up of humans and impersonal forces of evolution and complexity. Different geeks speak about the role of technology and its relationship to the present and future in different ways, and how they understand this relationship is related to their own rich understandings of the complex technical and political environment they live and work in. 243 Polymaths Polymathy is "avowed dilettantism," not extreme intelligence. It results from a curiosity that seems to grip a remarkable number of people who spend their time on the Internet and from the basic necessity of being able to evaluate and incorporate sometimes quite disparate fields of knowledge in order to build workable software. Polymathy inevitably emerges in the context of large software and networking projects; it is a creature of constraints, a process bootstrapped by the complex sediment of technologies, businesses, people, money, and plans. It might also be posed in the negative: bad software design is often the result of not enough avowed dilettantism. Polymaths must know a very large and wide range of things in order to intervene in an existing distribution of machines, people, practices, and places. They must have a detailed sense of the present, and the project of the present, in order to imagine how the future might be different. 244 My favorite polymath is Sean Doyle. Sean built the first versions of a piece of software that forms the centerpiece of the radiological-image-management company Amicas. In order to build it Sean learned the following: Java, to program it; the mathematics of wavelets, to encode the images; the workflow of hospital radiologists and the manner in which they make diagnoses from images, to make the interface usable; several incompatible databases and the SQL database language, to build the archive and repository; and manual after manual of technical standards, the largest and most frightening of which was the Digital Imaging and Communication (DICOM) standard for radiological images. Sean also read Science and Nature regularly, looking for inspiration about interface design; he read books and articles about imaging very small things (mosquito knees), very large things (galaxies and interstellar dust), very old things (fossils), and very pretty things (butterfly-wing patterns as a function of developmental pathways). Sean also introduced me to Tibetan food, to Jan Svankmeyer films, to Open Source Software, to cladistics and paleoherpetology, to Disney's scorched-earth policy with respect to culture, and to many other awesome things. 245 Sean is clearly an unusual character, but not that unusual. Over the years I have met many people with a similar range and depth of knowledge (though rarely with Sean's humility, which does set him apart). Polymathy is an occupational hazard for geeks. There is no sense in which a good programmer, software architect, or information architect simply specializes in code. Specialization is seen not as an end in itself, but rather as a kind of technical prerequisite before other work—the real work—can be accomplished. The real work is the design, the process of inserting usable software into a completely unfamiliar amalgamation of people, organizations, machines, and practices. Design is hard work, whereas the technical stuff—like choosing the right language or adhering to a standard or finding a ready-made piece of code to plug in somewhere—is not. 246 It is possible for Internet geeks and software architects to think this way in part due to the fact that so many of the technical issues they face are both extremely well defined and very easy to address with a quick search and download. It is easy to be an avowed dilettante in the age of mailing lists, newsgroups, and online scientific publishing. I myself have learned whole swaths of technical practices in this manner, but I have designed no technology of note. [pg 81] 247 Sean's partner in Amicas, Adrian Gropper, also fits the bill of polymath, though he is not a programmer. Adrian, a physician and a graduate of MIT's engineering program, might be called a "high-functioning polymath." He scans the horizon of technical and scientific accomplishments, looking for ways to incorporate them into his vision of medical technology qua intervention. Sean mockingly calls these "delusions," but both agree that Amicas would be nowhere without them. Adrian and Sean exemplify how the meanings of technology, intervention, design, and infrastructure are understood by polymaths as a particular form of pragmatic intervention, a progress achieved through deliberate, piecemeal re-formation of existing systems. As Adrian comments: 248 I firmly believe that in the long run the only way you can save money and improve healthcare is to add technology. I believe that more strongly than I believe, for instance, that if people invent better pesticides they'll be able to grow more rice, and it's for the universal good of the world to be able to support more people. I have some doubt as to whether I support people doing genetic engineering of crops and pesticides as being "to the good." But I do, however, believe that healthcare is different in that in the long run you can impact both the cost and quality of healthcare by adding technology. And you can call that a religious belief if you want, it's not rational. But I guess what I'm willing to say is that traditional healthcare that's not technology-based has pretty much run out of steam.74 74 Adrian Gropper, interview by author, 28 November 1998. 249 In this conversation, the "technological" is restricted to the novel things that can make healthcare less costly (i.e., cost-reducing, not cost-cutting), ease suffering, or extend life. Certain kinds of technological intervention are either superfluous or even pointless, and Adrian can't quite identify this "class"—it isn't "technology" in general, but it includes some kinds of things that are technological. What is more important is that technology does not solve anything by itself; it does not obviate the political problems of healthcare rationing: "Now, however, you get this other problem, which is that the way that healthcare is rationed is through the fear of pain, financial pain to some extent, but physical pain; so if you have a technology that, for instance, makes it relatively painless to fix . . . I guess, bluntly put, it's cheaper to let people die in most cases, and that's just undeniable. So what I find interesting in all of this, is that most people who are dealing with the politics of healthcare [pg 82] resource management don't want to have this discussion, nobody wants to talk about this, the doctors don't want to talk about it, because it's too depressing to talk about the value of. . . . And they don't really have a mandate to talk about technology."75 75 Adrian Gropper, interview by author, 28 November 1998. 250 Adrian's self-defined role in this arena is as a nonpracticing physician who is also an engineer and an entrepreneur—hence, his polymathy has emerged from his attempts to translate between doctors, engineers, and businesspeople. His goal is twofold: first, create technologies that save money and improve the allocation of healthcare (and the great dream of telemedicine concerns precisely this goal: the reallocation of the most valuable asset, individuals and their expertise); second, to raise the level of discussion in the business-cum-medical world about the role of technology in managing healthcare resources. Polymathy is essential, since Adrian's twofold mission requires understanding the language and lives of at least three distinct groups who work elbow-to-elbow in healthcare: engineers and software architects; doctors and nurses; and businessmen. 251 Technology has two different meanings according to Adrian's two goals: in the first case technology refers to the intervention by means of new technologies (from software, to materials, to electronics, to pharmaceuticals) in specific healthcare situations wherein high costs or limited access to care can be affected. Sometimes technology is allocated, sometimes it does the allocating. Adrian's goal is to match his knowledge of state-of-the-art technology—in particular, Internet technology—with a specific healthcare situation and thereby effect a reorganization of practices, people, tools, and information. The tool Amicas created was distinguished by its clever use of compression, Internet standards, and cheap storage media to compete with much larger, more expensive, much more entrenched "legacy" and "turnkey" systems. Whether Amicas invented something "new" is less interesting than the nature of this intervention into an existing milieu. This intervention is what Adrian calls "technology." For Amicas, the relevant technology—the important intervention—was the Internet, which Amicas conceived as a tool for changing the nature of the way healthcare was organized. Their goal was to replace the infrastructure of the hospital radiology department (and potentially the other departments as well) with the Internet. Amicas was able to confront and reform the practices of powerful, entrenched entities, from the administration of large [pg 83] hospitals to their corporate bedfellows, like HBOC, Agfa, Siemens, and GE. 252 With regard to raising the level of discussion, however, technology refers to a kind of political-rhetorical argument: technology does not save the world (nor does it destroy it); it only saves lives—and it does this only when one makes particular decisions about its allocation. Or, put differently, the means is technology, but the ends are still where the action is at. Thus, the hype surrounding information technology in healthcare is horrifying to Adrian: promises precede technologies, and the promises suggest that the means can replace the ends. Large corporations that promise "technology," but offer no real hard interventions (Adrian's first meaning of technology) that can be concretely demonstrated to reduce costs or improve allocation are simply a waste of resources. Such companies are doubly frustrating because they use "technology" as a blinder that allows people to not think about the hard problems (the ends) of allocation, equity, management, and organization; that is, they treat "technology" (the means) as if it were a solution as such. 253 Adrian routinely analyzes the rhetorical and practical uses of technology in healthcare with this kind of subtlety; clearly, such subtlety of thought is rare, and it sets Adrian apart as someone who understands that intervention into, and reform of, modern organizations and styles of thought has to happen through reformation—through the clever use of technology by people who understand it intimately—not through revolution. Reformation through technical innovation is opposed here to control through the consolidation of money and power. 254 In my observations, Adrian always made a point of making the technology—the software tools and picture-archiving system—easily accessible, easily demonstrable to customers. When talking to hospital purchasers, he often said something like "I can show you the software, and I can tell you the price, and I can demonstrate the problem it will solve." In contrast, however, an array of enormous corporations with salesmen and women (usually called consultants) were probably saying something more like "Your hospital needs more technology, our corporation is big and stable—give us this much money and we will solve your problem." For Adrian, the decision to "hold hands," as he put it, with the comfortably large corporation was irrational if the hospital could instead purchase a specific technology that did a specific thing, for a real price. [pg 84] 255 Adrian's reflections on technology are also reflections on the nature of progress. Progress is limited intervention structured by goals that are not set by the technology itself, even if entrepreneurial activity is specifically focused on finding new uses and new ideas for new technologies. But discussions about healthcare allocation—which Adrian sees as a problem amenable to certain kinds of technical solutions—are instead structured as if technology did not matter to the nature of the ends. It is a point Adrian resists: "I firmly believe that in the long run the only way you can save money and improve healthcare is to add technology." 256 Sean is similarly frustrated by the homogenization of the concept of technology, especially when it is used to suggest, for instance, that hospitals "lag behind" other industries with regard to computerization, a complaint usually made in order to either instigate investment or explain failures. Sean first objects to such a homogenous notion of "technological." 257 I actually have no idea what that means, that it's lagging behind. Because certainly in many ways in terms of image processing or some very high-tech things it's probably way ahead. And if that means what's on people's desktops, ever since 19-maybe-84 or so when I arrived at MGH [Massachusetts General Hospital] there's been a computer on pretty much everyone's desktop. . . . It seems like most hospitals that I have been to seem to have a serious commitment to networks and automation, etcetera. . . . I don't know about a lot of manufacturing industries—they might have computer consoles there, but it's a different sort of animal. Farms probably lag really far behind, I won't even talk about amusement parks. In some sense, hospitals are very complicated little communities, and so to say that this thing as a whole is lagging behind doesn't make much sense.76 76 Sean Doyle, interview by author, 30 March 1999. 258 He also objects to the notion that such a lag results in failures caused by technology, rather than by something like incompetence or bad management. In fact, it might be fair to say that, for the polymath, sometimes technology actually dissolves. Its boundaries are not easily drawn, nor are its uses, nor are its purported "unintended consequences." On one side there are rules, regulations, protocols, standards, norms, and forms of behavior; on the other there are organizational structures, business plans and logic, human skills, and other machines. This complex milieu requires reform from within: it cannot be replaced wholesale; it cannot leap-frog [pg 85] other industries in terms of computerization, as intervention is always local and strategic; and it involves a more complex relationship to the project of the present than simply "lagging behind" or "leaping ahead." 259 Polymathy—inasmuch as it is a polymathy of the lived experience of the necessity for multiple expertise to suit a situation—turns people into pragmatists. Technology is never simply a solution to a problem, but always part of a series of factors. The polymath, unlike the technophobe, can see when technology matters and when it doesn't. The polymath has a very this-worldly approach to technology: there is neither mystery nor promise, only human ingenuity and error. In this manner, polymaths might better be described as Feyerabendians than as pragmatists (and, indeed, Sean turned out to be an avid reader of Feyerabend). The polymath feels there is no single method by which technology works its magic: it is highly dependent on rules, on patterned actions, and on the observation of contingent and contextual factors. Intervention into this already instituted field of people, machines, tools, desires, and beliefs requires a kind of scientific-technical genius, but it is hardly single, or even autonomous. This version of pragmatism is, as Feyerabend sometimes refers to it, simply a kind of awareness: of standards, of rules, of history, of possibility.77 The polymath thus does not allow himself or herself to despise the present, but insists on both reflecting on it and intervening in it. 77 Feyerabend, Against Method, 215-25. 260 Sean and Adrian are avowedly scientific and technical people; like Feyerabend, they assume that their interlocutors believe in good science and the benefits of progress. They have little patience for Luddites, for new-agers, for religious intolerance, or for any other non-Enlightenment-derived attitude. They do not despise the present, because they have a well-developed sense of how provisional the conventions of modern technology and business are. Very little is sacred, and rules, when they exist, are fragile. Breaking them pointlessly is immodest, but innovation is often itself seen as a way of transforming a set of accepted rules or practices to other ends. Progress is limited intervention.78 78 One of the ways Adrian discusses innovation is via the argument of the Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma. It describes "sustaining vs. disruptive" technologies as less an issue of how technologies work or what they are made of, and more an issue of how their success and performance are measured. See Adrian Gropper, "The Internet as a Disruptive Technology," Imaging Economics, December 2001, <http://www.imagingeconomics.com/library/200112-10.asp> (accessed 19 September 2006). 261 How ironic, and troubling, then, to realize that Sean's and Adrian's company would eventually become the kind of thing they started Amicas in order to reform. Outside of the limited intervention, certain kinds of momentum seem irresistible: the demand for investment and funding rounds, the need for "professional management," [pg 86] and the inertia of already streamlined and highly conservative purchasing practices in healthcare. For Sean and Adrian, Amicas became a failure in its success. Nonetheless, they remain resolutely modern polymaths: they do not despise the present. As described in Kant's "What Is Enlightenment?" the duty of the citizen is broken into public and private: on the one hand, a duty to carry out the responsibilities of an office; on the other, a duty to offer criticism where criticism is due, as a "scholar" in a reading public. Sean's and Adrian's endeavor, in the form of a private start-up company, might well be understood as the expression of the scholar's duty to offer criticism, through the creation of a particular kind of technical critique of an existing (and by their assessment) ethically suspect healthcare system. The mixture of private capital, public institutions, citizenship, and technology, however, is something Kant could not have known—and Sean and Adrian's technical pursuits must be understood as something more: a kind of modern civic duty, in the service of liberty and responding to the particularities of contemporary technical life.79 79 On kinds of civic duty, see Fortun and Fortun, "Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology." 262 Transhumanists Polymathy is born of practical and pragmatic engagement with specific situations, and in some ways is demanded by such exigencies. Opposite polymathy, however, and leaning more toward a concern with the whole, with totality and the universal, are attitudes that I refer to by the label transhumanism, which concerns the mode of belief in the Timeline of Technical Progress.80 80 There is, in fact, a very specific group of people called transhumanists, about whom I will say very little. I invoke the label here because I think certain aspects of transhumanism are present across the spectrum of engineers, scientists, and geeks. 263 Transhumanism, the movement and the philosophy, focuses on the power of technology to transcend the limitations of the human body as currently evolved. Subscribers believe—but already this is the wrong word—in the possibility of downloading consciousness onto silicon, of cryobiological suspension, of the near emergence of strong artificial intelligence and of various other forms of technical augmentation of the human body for the purposes of achieving immortality—or at least, much more life.81 81 See the World Transhumanist Association, <http://transhumanism.org/> (accessed 1 December 2003) or the Extropy Institute, <http://www.extropy.org/> (accessed 1 December 2003). See also Doyle, Wetwares, and Battaglia, "For Those Who Are Not Afraid of the Future," for a sidelong glance. 264 Various groups could be reasonably included under this label. There are the most ardent purveyors of the vision, the Extropians; there are a broad class of people who call themselves transhumanists; there is a French-Canadian subclass, the Raelians, who are more an alien-worshiping cult than a strictly scientific one and are bitterly denounced by the first two; there are also the variety of cosmologists and engineers who do not formally consider themselves [pg 87] transhumanist, but whose beliefs participate in some way or another: Stephen Hawking, Frank Tipler and John Barrow (famous for their anthropic cosmological principle), Hans Moravic, Ray Kurzweil, Danny Hillis, and down the line through those who embrace the cognitive sciences, the philosophy of artificial intelligence, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and so forth. 265 Historically speaking, the line of descent is diffuse. Teilhard de Chardin is broadly influential, sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not (depending on the amount of mysticism allowed). A more generally recognized starting point is Julian Huxley's article "Transhumanism" in New Bottles for New Wine.82 Huxley's transhumanism, like Teilhard's, has a strange whiff of Nietzsche about it, though it tends much more strongly in the direction of the evolutionary emergence of the superman than in the more properly moral sense Nietzsche gave it. After Huxley, the notion of transhumanism is too easily identified with eugenics, and it has become one of a series of midcentury subcultural currents which finds expression largely in small, non-mainstream places, from the libertarians to Esalen.83 82 Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine, 13-18. 83 The computer scientist Bill Joy wrote a long piece in Wired warning of the outcomes of research conducted without ethical safeguards and the dangers of eugenics in the past, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," Wired 8.4 [April 2000], <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html> (accessed 27 June 2005). 266 For many observers, transhumanists are a lunatic fringe, bounded on either side by alien abductees and Ayn Rand-spouting objectivists. However, like so much of the fringe, it merely represents in crystalline form attitudes that seem to permeate discussions more broadly, whether as beliefs professed or as beliefs attributed. Transhumanism, while probably anathema to most people, actually reveals a very specific attitude toward technical innovation, technical intervention, and political life that is widespread among technically adept individuals. It is a belief that has everything to do also with the timeline of progress and the role of technology in it. 267 The transhumanist understanding of technological progress can best be understood through the sometimes serious and sometimes playful concept of the "singularity," popularized by the science-fiction writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge.84 The "singularity" is the point at which the speed of technical progress is faster than human comprehension of that progress (and, by implication, than human control over the course). It is a kind of cave-man parable, perhaps most beautifully rendered by Stanley Kubrik's film 2001: A Space Odyssey (in particular, in the jump-cut early in the film that turns a hurled bone into a spinning space station, recapitulating the remarkable adventure of technology in two short seconds of an otherwise seemingly endless film). 84 Vinge, "The Coming Technological Singularity." 268 [2bits_02_01-100.png] *1 *1 Illustration © 2005 Ray Kurzweil. Modifications © 2007 by C. Kelty. Original work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:PPTCountdowntoSingularityLog.jpg>. 269 In figure 1, on the left hand of the timeline, there is history, or rather, there is a string of technological inventions (by which is implied that previous inventions set the stage for later ones) spaced such that they produce a logarithmic curve that can look very much like the doomsday population curves that started to appear in the 1960s. Each invention is associated with a name or sometimes a nation. Beyond the edge of the graph to the right side is the future: history changes here from a series of inventions to an autonomous self-inventing technology associated not with individual inventors but with a complex system of evolutionary adaptation that includes technological as well as biological forms. It is a future in which "humans" are no longer necessary to the progress of science and technology: technology-as-extension-of-humans on the left, a Borg-like autonomous technical intelligence on the right. The fundamental [pg 89] operation in constructing the "singularity" is the "reasoned extrapolation" familiar to the "hard science fiction" writer or the futurist. One takes present technology as the initial condition for future possibilities and extrapolates based on the (haphazardly handled) evidence of past technical speed-up and change. 270 The position of the observer is always a bit uncertain, since he or she is naturally projected at the highest (or lowest, depending on your orientation) point of this curve, but one implication is clear: that the function or necessity of human reflection on the present will disappear at the same time that humans do, rendering enlightenment a quaint, but necessary, step on the route to superrational, transhuman immortality. 271 Strangely, the notion that technical progress has acceleration seems to precede any sense of what the velocity of progress might mean in the first instance; technology is presumed to exist in absolute time—from the Big Bang to the heat death of the universe—and not in any relationship with human life or consciousness. The singularity is always described from the point of view of a god who is not God. The fact of technological speed-up is generally treated as the most obvious thing in the world, reinforced by the constant refrain in the media of the incredible pace of change in contemporary society. 272 Why is the singularity important? Because it always implies that the absolute fact of technical acceleration—this knowing glance into the future—should order the kinds of interventions that occur in the present. It is not mute waiting or eschatological certainty that governs this attitude; rather, it is a mode of historical consciousness that privileges the inevitability of technological progress over the inevitability of human power. Only by looking into the future can one manipulate the present in a way that will be widely meaningful, an attitude that could be expressed as something like "Those who do not learn from the future are condemned to suffer in it." Since it is a philosophy based on the success of human rationality and ingenuity, rationality and ingenuity are still clearly essential in the future. They lead, however, to a kind of posthuman state of constant technological becoming which is inconceivable to the individual human mind—and can only be comprehended by a transcendental intelligence that is not God. 273 Such is a fair description of some strands of transhumanism, and the reason I highlight them is to characterize the kinds of attitudes [pg 90] toward technology-as-intervention and the ideas of moral and technical order that geeks can evince. On the far side of polymathy, geeks are too close to the machine to see a big picture or to think about imponderable philosophical issues; on the transhuman side, by contrast, one is constantly reassessing the arcane details of everyday technical change with respect to a vision of the whole—a vision of the evolution of technology and its relationship to the humans that (for the time being) must create and attempt to channel it. 274 My favorite transhumanist is Eugen Leitl (who is, in fact, an authentic transhumanist and has been vice-chair of the World Transhumanist Association). Eugen is Russian-born, lives in Munich, and once worked in a cryobiology research lab. He is well versed in chemistry, nanotechnology, artificial-intelligence (AI) research, computational- and network-complexity research, artificial organs, cryobiology, materials engineering, and science fiction. He writes, for example, 275 If you consider AI handcoded by humans, yes. However, given considerable computational resources (~cubic meter of computronium), and using suitable start population, you can coevolve machine intelligence on a time scale of much less than a year. After it achieves about a human level, it is potentially capable of entering an autofeedback loop. Given that even autoassembly-grade computronium is capable of running a human-grade intellect in a volume ranging from a sugar cube to an orange at a speed ranging from 10^4 . . . 10^6 it is easy to see that the autofeedback loop has explosive dynamics. 276 (I hope above is intelligible, I've been exposed to weird memes for far too long).85 85 Eugen Leitl, e-mail to Silk-list mailing list, 16 May 2000, <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/2410>. 277 Eugen is also a polymath (and an autodidact to boot), but in the conventional sense. Eugen's polymathy is an avocational necessity: transhumanists need to keep up with all advances in technology and science in order to better assess what kinds of human-augmenting or human-obsolescing technologies are out there. It is not for work in this world that the transhumanist expands his or her knowledge, nor quite for the next, but for a "this world" yet to arrive. 278 Eugen and I were introduced during the Napster debates of 2001, which seemed at the time to be a knock-down, drag-out conflagration, but Eugen has been involved in so many online flame wars that he probably experienced it as a mere blip in an otherwise constant struggle with less-evolved intelligences like mine. Nonetheless, [pg 91] it was one of the more clarifying examples of how geeks think, and think differently, about technology, infrastructure, networks, and software. Transhumanism has no truck with old-fashioned humanism. 279     > > From: Ramu Narayan . . .
    > > I don't like the
    > > notion of technology as an unstoppable force with a will of its own that
    > > has nothing to do with the needs of real people.
 280 [Eugen Leitl:] Emergent large-scale behaviour is nothing new. How do you intend to control individual behaviour of a large population of only partially rational agents? They don't come with too many convenient behaviour-modifying hooks (pheromones as in social insects, but notice menarche-synch in females sharing quarters), and for a good reason. The few hooks we have (mob, war, politics, religion) have been notoriously abused, already. Analogous to apoptosis, metaindividuals may function using processes deletorious[sic] to its components (us).86 86 Eugen Leitl, e-mail to Silk-list mailing list, 7 August 2000, <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/2932>. 281 Eugen's understanding of what "technological progress" means is sufficiently complex to confound most of his interlocutors. For one surprising thing, it is not exactly inevitable. The manner in which Leitl argues with people is usually a kind of machine-gun prattle of coevolutionary, game-theoretic, cryptographic sorites. Eugen piles on the scientific and transhumanist reasoning, and his interlocutors slowly peel away from the discussion. But it isn't craziness, hype, or half-digested popular science—Eugen generally knows his stuff—it just fits together in a way that almost no one else can quite grasp. Eugen sees the large-scale adoption and proliferation of technologies (particularly self-replicating molecular devices and evolutionary software algorithms) as a danger that transcends all possibility of control at the individual or state level. Billions of individual decisions do not "average" into one will, but instead produce complex dynamics and hang perilously on initial conditions. In discussing the possibility of the singularity, Eugen suggests, "It could literally be a science-fair project [that causes the singularity]." If Francis Bacon's understanding of the relation between Man and Nature was that of master and possessor, Eugen's is its radicalization: Man is a powerful but ultimately arbitrary force in the progress of Life-Intelligence. Man is fully incorporated into Nature in this story, [pg 92] so much so that he dissolves into it. Eugen writes, when "life crosses over into this petri dish which is getting readied, things will become a lot more lively. . . . I hope we'll make it." 282 For Eugen, the arguments about technology that the polymaths involve themselves in couldn't be more parochial. They are important only insofar as they will set the "initial conditions" for the grand coevolutionary adventure of technology ahead of us. For the transhumanist, technology does not dissolve. Instead, it is the solution within which humans are dissolved. Suffering, allocation, decision making—all these are inessential to the ultimate outcome of technological progress; they are worldly affairs, even if they concern life and death, and as such, they can be either denounced or supported, but only with respect to fine-tuning the acceleration toward the singularity. For the transhumanist, one can't fight the inevitability of technical evolution, but one certainly can contribute to it. Technical progress is thus both law-like and subject to intelligent manipulation; technical progress is inevitable, but only because of the power of massively parallel human curiosity. 283 Considered as one of the modes of thought present in this-worldly political discussion, the transhumanist (like the polymath) turns technology into a rhetorical argument. Technology is the more powerful political argument because "it works." It is pointless to argue "about" technology, but not pointless to argue through and with it. It is pointless to talk about whether stopping technology is good or bad, because someone will simply build a technology that will invalidate your argument. 284 There is still a role for technical invention, but it is strongly distinguished from political, legal, cultural, or social interventions. For most transhumanists, there is no rhetoric here, no sophistry, just the pure truth of "it works": the pure, undeniable, unstoppable, and undeconstructable reality of technology. For the transhumanist attitude, the reality of "working code" has a reality that other assertions about the world do not. Extreme transhumanism replaces the life-world with the world of the computer, where bad (ethically bad) ideas won't compile. Less-staunch versions of transhumanism simply allow the confusion to operate opportunistically: the progress of technology is unquestionable (omniscient), and only its effects on humans are worth investigating. 285 The pure transhumanist, then, is a countermodern. The transhumanist despises the present for its intolerably slow descent into the [pg 93] future of immortality and superhuman self-improvement, and fears destruction because of too much turbulent (and ignorant) human resistance. One need have no individual conception of the present, no reflection on or synthetic understanding of it. One only need contribute to it correctly. One might even go so far as to suggest that forms of reflection on the present that do not contribute to technical progress endanger the very future of life-intelligence. Curiosity and technical innovation are not historical features of Western science, but natural features of a human animal that has created its own conditions for development. Thus, the transhumanists' historical consciousness consists largely of a timeline that makes ordered sense of our place on the progress toward the Singularity. 286 The moral of the story is not just that technology determines history, however. Transhumanism is a radically antihumanist position in which human agency or will—if it even exists—is not ontologically distinct from the agency of machines and animals and life itself. Even if it is necessary to organize, do things, make choices, participate, build, hack, innovate, this does not amount to a belief in the ability of humans to control their destiny, individually or collectively. In the end, the transhumanist cannot quite pinpoint exactly what part of this story is inevitable—except perhaps the story itself. Technology does not develop without millions of distributed humans contributing to it; humans cannot evolve without the explicit human adoption of life-altering and identity-altering technologies; evolution cannot become inevitable without the manipulation of environments and struggles for fitness. As in the dilemma of Calvinism (wherein one cannot know if one is saved by one's good works), the transhumanist must still create technology according to the particular and parochial demands of the day, but this by no means determines the eventual outcome of technological progress. It is a sentiment well articulated by Adam Ferguson and highlighted repeatedly by Friederich Hayek with respect to human society: "the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design."87 87 Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, 1:20. 287 Conclusion 288 To many observers, geeks exhibit a perhaps bewildering mix of liberalism, libertarianism, anarchism, idealism, and pragmatism, [pg 94] yet tend to fall firmly into one or another constituted political category (liberal, conservative, socialist, capitalist, neoliberal, etc.). By showing how geeks make use of the Protestant Reformation as a usable past and how they occupy a spectrum of beliefs about progress, liberty, and intervention, I hope to resist this urge to classify. Geeks are an interesting case precisely because they are involved in the creation of new things that change the meaning of our constituted political categories. Their politics are mixed up and combined with the technical details of the Internet, Free Software, and the various and sundry organizations, laws, people, and practices that they deal with on a regular basis: operating systems and social systems. But such mixing does not make Geeks merely technoliberals or technoconservatives. Rather, it reveals how they think through the specific, historically unique situation of the Internet to the general problems of knowledge and power, liberty and enlightenment, progress and intervention. 289 Geeks are not a kind of person: geeks are geeks only insofar as they come together in new, technically mediated forms of their own creation and in ways that are not easy to identify (not language, not culture, not markets, not nations, not telephone books or databases). While their affinity is very clearly constituted through the Internet, the Internet is not the only reason for that affinity. It is this collective affinity that I refer to as a recursive public. Because it is impossible to understand this affinity by trying to identify particular types of people, it is necessary to turn to historically specific sets of practices that form the substance of their affinity. Free Software is an exemplary case—perhaps the exemplar—of a recursive public. To understand Free Software through its changing practices not only gives better access to the life-world of the geek but also reveals how the structure of a recursive public comes into being and manages to persist and transform, how it can become a powerful form of life that extends its affinities beyond technophile geeks into the realms of ordinary life. 290 Part II free software 291 3. The Movement 292 Part II of Two Bits describes what Free Software is and where it came from, with each of its five chapters detailing the historical narrative of a particular kind of practice: creating a movement, sharing source code, conceptualizing openness or open systems, writing copyright (and copyleft) licenses, and coordinating collaborations. Taken together, the stories describe Free Software. The stories have their endpoint (or starting point, genealogically speaking) in the years 1998-99, when Free Software burst onto the scene: on the cover of Forbes magazine, as part of the dotcom boom, and in the boardrooms of venture-capital firms and corporations like IBM and Netscape. While the chapters that make up part II can be read discretely to understand the practices that are the sine qua non of Free Software, they can also be read continuously, as a meandering story of the history of software and networks stretching from the late 1950s to the present. 293 Rather than define what makes Free Software free or Open Source open, Two Bits treats the five practices as parts of a collective technical experimental system: each component has its own history, development, and temporality, but they come together as a package and emerge as a recognizable thing around 1998-99. As with any experimental system, changing the components changes the operation and outcomes of the whole. Free Software so conceived is a kind of experimental system: its practices can be adopted, adapted, and modulated in new contexts and new places, but it is one whose rules are collectively determined and frequently modified. It is possible to see in each of the five practices where choices about how to do Free Software reached, or surpassed, certain limits, but nonetheless remained part of a system whose identity finally firmed up in the period 1998-99 and after. 294 The first of these practices—the making of Free Software into a movement—is both the most immediately obvious and the most difficult to grasp. By the term movement I refer to the practice, among geeks, of arguing about and discussing the structure and meaning of Free Software: what it consists of, what it is for, and whether or not it is a movement. Some geeks call Free Software a movement, and some don't; some talk about the ideology and goals of Free Software, and some don't; some call it Free Software, while others call it Open Source. Amid all this argument, however, Free Software geeks recognize that they are all doing the same thing: the practice of creating a movement is the practice of talking about the meaning and necessity of the other four practices. It was in 1998-99 that geeks came to recognize that they were all doing the same thing and, almost immediately, to argue about why.88 88 For instance, Richard Stallman writes, "The Free Software movement and the Open Source movement are like two political camps within the free software community. Radical groups in the 1960s developed a reputation for factionalism: organizations split because of disagreements on details of strategy, and then treated each other as enemies. Or at least, such is the [pg 322] image people have of them, whether or not it was true. The relationship between the Free Software movement and the Open Source movement is just the opposite of that picture. We disagree on the basic principles, but agree more or less on the practical recommendations. So we can and do work together on many specific projects. We don't think of the Open Source movement as an enemy. The enemy is proprietary software" ("Why ‘ Free Software' Is Better than ‘ Open Source,'" GNU's Not Unix! <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html> [accessed 9 July 2006]). By contrast, the Open Source Initiative characterizes the relationship as follows: "How is ‘ open source' related to ‘ free software'? The Open Source Initiative is a marketing program for free software. It's a pitch for ‘ free software' because it works, not because it's the only right thing to do. We're selling freedom on its merits" (<http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/faq.php> [accessed 9 July 2006]). There are a large number of definitions of Free Software: canonical definitions include Richard Stallman's writings on the Free Software Foundation's Web site, www.fsf.org, including the "Free Software Definition" and "Confusing Words and Phrases that Are Worth Avoiding." From the Open Source side there is the "Open Source Definition" (<http://www.opensource.org/licenses/)>. Unaffiliated definitions can be found at www.freedomdefined.org. 295 One way to understand the movement is through the story of Netscape and the Mozilla Web browser (now known as Firefox). Not only does this story provide some context for the stories of geeks presented in part I—and I move here from direct participant observation to historical and archival research on a phenomenon that was occurring at roughly the same time—but it also contains all the elements necessary to understand Free Software. It is full of discussion and argument about the practices that make up Free Software: sharing source code, conceiving of openness, writing licenses, and coordinating collaborations. 296 Forking Free Software, 1997-2000 297 Free Software forked in 1998 when the term Open Source suddenly appeared (a term previously used only by the CIA to refer to unclassified sources of intelligence). The two terms resulted in two separate kinds of narratives: the first, regarding Free Software, stretched back into the 1980s, promoting software freedom and resistance to proprietary software "hoarding," as Richard Stallman, the head of the Free Software Foundation, refers to it; the second, regarding Open Source, was associated with the dotcom boom and the evangelism of the libertarian pro-business hacker Eric Raymond, who focused on the economic value and cost savings that Open Source Software represented, including the pragmatic (and polymathic) approach that governed the everyday use of Free Software in some of the largest online start-ups (Amazon, Yahoo!, HotWired, and others all "promoted" Free Software by using it to run their shops). 298 A critical point in the emergence of Free Software occurred in 1998-99: new names, new narratives, but also new wealth and new stakes. "Open Source" was premised on dotcom promises of cost-cutting and "disintermediation" and various other schemes to make money on it (Cygnus Solutions, an early Free Software company, playfully tagged itself as "Making Free Software More Affordable"). VA Linux, for instance, which sold personal-computer systems pre-installed with Open Source operating systems, had the largest single initial public offering (IPO) of the stock-market bubble, seeing a 700 percent share-price increase in one day. "Free Software" by contrast fanned kindling flames of worry over intellectual-property expansionism and hitched itself to a nascent legal resistance to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Prior to 1998, Free Software referred either to the Free Software Foundation (and the watchful, micromanaging eye of Stallman) or to one of thousands of different commercial, avocational, or university-research projects, processes, licenses, and ideologies that had a variety of names: sourceware, freeware, shareware, open software, public domain software, and so on. The term Open Source, by contrast, sought to encompass them all in one movement. 299 The event that precipitated this attempted semantic coup d'état was the release of the source code for Netscape's Communicator [pg 100] Web browser. It's tough to overestimate the importance of Netscape to the fortunes of Free Software. Netscape is justly famous for its 1995 IPO and its decision to offer its core product, Netscape Navigator, for free (meaning a compiled, binary version could be downloaded and installed "for zero dollars"). But Netscape is far more famous among geeks for giving away something else, in 1998: the source code to Netscape Communicator (née Navigator). Giving away the Navigator application endeared Netscape to customers and confused investors. Giving away the Communicator source code in 1998 endeared Netscape to geeks and confused investors; it was ignored by customers. 300 Netscape is important from a number of perspectives. Businesspeople and investors knew Netscape as the pet project of the successful businessman Jim Clarke, who had founded the specialty computer manufacturer, Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI). To computer scientists and engineers, especially in the small university town of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, Netscape was known as the highest bidder for the WWW team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. That team—Marc Andreessen, Rob McCool, Eric Bina, Jon Mittelhauser, Aleks Totic, and Chris Houck—had created Mosaic, the first and most fondly remembered "graphical browser" for surfing the World Wide Web. Netscape was thus first known as Mosaic Communications Corporation and switched its name only after legal threats from NCSA and a rival firm, Spyglass. Among geeks, Netscape was known as home to a number of Free Software hackers and advocates, most notably Jamie Zawinski, who had rather flamboyantly broken rank with the Free Software Foundation by forking the GNU EMACS code to create what was first known as Lucid Emacs and later as XEmacs. Zawinski would go on to lead the newly free Netscape browser project, now known as Mozilla. 301 Meanwhile, most regular computer users remember Netscape both as an emblem of the dotcom boom's venture-fed insanity and as yet another of Microsoft's victims. Although Netscape exploded onto the scene in 1995, offering a feature-rich browser that was an alternative to the bare-bones Mosaic browser, it soon began to lose ground to Microsoft, which relatively quickly adopted the strategy of giving away its browser, Internet Explorer, as if it were part of the Windows operating system; this was a practice that the U.S. Department of Justice eventually found to be in violation of [pg 101] antitrust laws and for which Microsoft was convicted, but never punished. 302 The nature of Netscape's decision to release the source code differs based on which perspective it is seen from. It could appear to be a business plan modeled on the original success: give away your product and make money in the stock market. It could appear to be a strategic, last-gasp effort to outcompete Microsoft. It could also appear, and did appear to many geeks, to be an attempt to regain some of that "hacker-cred" it once had acquired by poaching the NCSA team, or even to be an attempt to "do the right thing" by making one of the world's most useful tools into Free Software. But why would Netscape reach such a conclusion? By what reasoning would such a decision seem to be correct? The reasons for Netscape's decision to "free the source" recapitulate the five core practices of Free Software—and provided key momentum for the new movement. 303 Sharing Source Code Netscape's decision to share its source code could only seem surprising in the context of the widespread practice of keeping source code secret; secrecy was a practice followed largely in order to prevent competitors from copying a program and competing with it, but also as a means to control the market itself. The World Wide Web that Andreessen's team at NCSA had cut their teeth on was itself designed to be "platform independent" and accessible by any device on the network. In practice, however, this meant that someone needed to create "browsers" for each different computer or device. Mosaic was initially created for UNIX, using the Motif library of the X11 Window System—in short, a very specific kind of access. Netscape, by contrast, prided itself on "porting" Netscape Navigator to nearly all available computer architectures. Indeed, by 1997, plans were under way to create a version of the browser—written in Java, the programming language created by Sun Microsystems to "write once, run anywhere"—that would be completely platform independent. 304 The Java-based Navigator (called Javagator, of course) created a problem, however, with respect to the practice of keeping source code secret. Whenever a program in Java was run, it created a set of "bytecodes" that were easy to reverse-engineer because they had to be transmitted from the server to the machine that ran the program and were thus visible to anyone who might know how and where to look. Netscape engineers flirted with the idea of deliberately [pg 102] obfuscating these bytecodes to deter competitors from copying them. How can one compete, the logic goes, if anyone can copy your program and make their own ersatz version? 305 Zawinski, among others, suggested that this was a bad idea: why not just share the source code and get people to help make it better? As a longtime participant in Free Software, Zawinski understood the potential benefits of receiving help from a huge pool of potential contributors. He urged his peers at Netscape to see the light. However, although he told them stories and showed them successes, he could never make the case that this was an intelligent business plan, only that it was an efficient software-engineering plan. From the perspective of management and investors, such a move seemed tantamount to simply giving away the intellectual property of the company itself. 306 Frank Hecker, a sales manager, made the link between the developers and management: "It was obvious to [developers] why it was important. It wasn't really clear from a senior management level why releasing the source code could be of use because nobody ever made the business case."89 Hecker penned a document called "Netscape Source Code as Netscape Product" and circulated it to various people, including Andreessen and Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale. As the title suggests, the business case was that the source code could also be a product, and in the context of Netscape, whose business model was "give it away and make it up on the stock market," such a proposal seemed less insane than it otherwise might have: "When Netscape first made Navigator available for unrestricted download over the Internet, many saw this as flying in the face of conventional wisdom for the commercial software business, and questioned how we could possibly make money ‘ giving our software away.' Now of course this strategy is seen in retrospect as a successful innovation that was a key factor in Netscape's rapid growth, and rare is the software company today that does not emulate our strategy in one way or another. Among other things, this provokes the following question: What if we were to repeat this scenario, only this time with source code?"90 89 Moody, Rebel Code, 193. 90 Frank Hecker, quoted in Hamerly and Paquin, "Freeing the Source," 198. 307 Under the influence of Hecker, Zawinski, and CTO Eric Hahn (who had also written various internal "heresy documents" suggesting similar approaches), Netscape eventually made the decision to share their source code with the outside world, a decision that resulted in a famous January 1998 press release describing the aims [pg 103] and benefits of doing so. The decision, at that particular point in Netscape's life, and in the midst of the dotcom boom, was certainly momentous, but it did not lead either to a financial windfall or to a suddenly superior product.91 91 See Moody, Rebel Code, chap. 11, for a more detailed version of the story. 308 Conceptualizing Open Systems Releasing the source code was, in a way, an attempt to regain the trust of the people who had first imagined the www. Tim Berners-Lee, the initial architect of the www, was always adamant that the protocol and all its implementations should be freely available (meaning either "in the public domain" or "released as Free Software"). Indeed, Berners-Lee had done just that with his first bare-bones implementations of the www, proudly declaring them to be in the public domain. 309 Over the course of the 1990s, the "browser wars" caused both Netscape and Microsoft to stray far from this vision: each had implemented its own extensions and "features" to the browsers and servers, extensions not present in the protocol that Berners-Lee had created or in the subsequent standards created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Included in the implementations were various kinds of "evil" that could make browsers fail to work on certain operating systems or with certain kinds of servers. The "browser wars" repeated an open-systems battle from the 1980s, one in which the attempt to standardize a network operating system (UNIX) was stymied by competition and secrecy, at the same time that consortiums devoted to "openness" were forming in order to try to prevent the spread of evil. Despite the fact that both Microsoft and Netscape were members of the W3C, the noncompatibility of their browsers clearly represented the manipulation of the standards process in the name of competitive advantage. 310 Releasing the source code for Communicator was thus widely seen as perhaps the only way to bypass the poisoned well of competitively tangled, nonstandard browser implementations. An Open Source browser could be made to comply with the standards—if not by the immediate members involved with its creation, then by creating a "fork" of the program that was standards compliant—because of the rights of redistribution associated with an Open Source license. Open Source would be the solution to an open-systems problem that had never been solved because it had never confronted the issue of intellectual property directly. Free Software, by contrast, had a well-developed solution in the GNU General Public License, [pg 104] also known as copyleft license, that would allow the software to remain free and revive hope for maintaining open standards. 311 Writing Licenses Herein lies the rub, however: Netscape was immediately embroiled in controversy among Free Software hackers because it chose to write its own bespoke licenses for distributing the source code. Rather than rely on one of the existing licenses, such as the GNU GPL or the Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) or MIT licenses, they created their own: the Netscape Public License (NPL) and the Mozilla Public License. The immediate concerns of Netscape had to do with their existing network of contracts and agreements with other, third-party developers—both those who had in the past contributed parts of the existing source code that Netscape might not have the rights to redistribute as Free Software, and those who were expecting in the future to buy and redistribute a commercial version. Existing Free Software licenses were either too permissive, giving to third parties rights that Netscape itself might not have, or too restrictive, binding Netscape to make source code freely available (the GPL) when it had already signed contracts with buyers of the nonfree code. 312 It was a complex and specific business situation—a network of existing contracts and licensed code—that created the need for Netscape to write its own license. The NPL thus contained a clause that allowed Netscape special permission to relicense any particular contribution to the source code as a proprietary product in order to appease its third-party contracts; it essentially gave Netscape special rights that no other licensee would have. While this did not necessarily undermine the Free Software licenses—and it was certainly Netscape's prerogative—it was contrary to the spirit of Free Software: it broke the "recursive public" into two halves. In order to appease Free Software geeks, Netscape wrote one license for existing code (the NPL) and a different license for new contributions: the Mozilla Public License. 313 Neither Stallman nor any other Free Software hacker was entirely happy with this situation. Stallman pointed out three flaws: "One flaw sends a bad philosophical message, another puts the free software community in a weak position, while the third creates a major practical problem within the free software community. Two of the flaws apply to the Mozilla Public License as well." He urged people [pg 105] not to use the NPL. Similarly, Bruce Perens suggested, "Many companies have adopted a variation of the MPL [sic] for their own programs. This is unfortunate, because the NPL was designed for the specific business situation that Netscape was in at the time it was written, and is not necessarily appropriate for others to use. It should remain the license of Netscape and Mozilla, and others should use the GPL or the BSD or X licenses."92 92 Bruce Perens, "The Open Source Definition," 184. 314 Arguments about the fine details of licenses may seem scholastic, but the decision had a huge impact on the structure of the new product. As Steven Weber has pointed out, the choice of license tracks the organization of a product and can determine who and what kinds of contributions can be made to a project.93 It is not an idle choice; every new license is scrutinized with the same intensity or denounced with the same urgency. 93 Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source. 315 Coordinating Collaborations One of the selling points of Free Software, and especially of its marketing as Open Source, is that it leverages the work of thousands or hundreds of thousands of volunteer contributors across the Internet. Such a claim almost inevitably leads to spurious talk of "self-organizing" systems and emergent properties of distributed collaboration. The Netscape press release promised to "harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the Internet by incorporating their best enhancements," and it quoted CEO Jim Barksdale as saying, "By giving away the source code for future versions, we can ignite the creative energies of the entire Net community and fuel unprecedented levels of innovation in the browser market."94 But as anyone who has ever tried to start or run a Free Software project knows, it never works out that way. 94 "Netscape Announces Plans to Make Next-Generation Communicator Source Code Available Free on the Net," Netscape press release, 22 January 1998, <http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html> (accessed 25 Sept 2007). 316 Software engineering is a notoriously hard problem.95 The halls of the software industry are lined with the warning corpses of dead software methodologies. Developing software in the dotcom boom was no different, except that the speed of release cycles and the velocity of funding (the "burn rate") was faster than ever before. Netscape's in-house development methodologies were designed to meet these pressures, and as many who work in this field will attest, that method is some version of a semistructured, deadline-driven, caffeine- and smart-drink-fueled race to "ship."96 95 On the history of software development methodologies, see Mahoney, "The Histories of Computing(s)" and "The Roots of Software Engineering." 96 Especially good descriptions of what this cycle is like can be found in Ullman, Close to the Machine and The Bug. 317 Releasing the Mozilla code, therefore, required a system of coordination that would differ from the normal practice of in-house [pg 106] software development by paid programmers. It needed to incorporate the contributions of outsiders—developers who didn't work for Netscape. It also needed to entice people to contribute, since that was the bargain on which the decision to free the source was based, and to allow them to track their contributions, so they could verify that their contributions were included or rejected for legitimate reasons. In short, if any magical Open Source self-organization were to take place, it would require a thoroughly transparent, Internet-based coordination system. 318 At the outset, this meant practical things: obtaining the domain name mozilla.org; setting up (and in turn releasing the source code for) the version-control system (the Free Software standard cvs), the version-control interface (Bonsai), the "build system" that managed and displayed the various trees and (broken) branches of a complex software project (Tinderbox), and a bug-reporting system for tracking bugs submitted by users and developers (Bugzilla). It required an organizational system within the Mozilla project, in which paid developers would be assigned to check submissions from inside and outside, and maintainers or editors would be designated to look at and verify that these contributions should be used. 319 In the end, the release of the Mozilla source code was both a success and a failure. Its success was long in coming: by 2004, the Firefox Web browser, based on Mozilla, had started to creep up the charts of most popular browsers, and it has become one of the most visible and widely used Free Software applications. The failure, however, was more immediate: Mozilla failed to reap the massive benefits for Netscape that the 1995 give-away of Netscape Navigator had. Zawinski, in a public letter of resignation in April 1999 (one year after the release), expressed this sense of failure. He attributed Netscape's decline after 1996 to the fact that it had "stopped innovating" and become too large to be creative, and described the decision to free the Mozilla source code as a return to this innovation: "[The announcement] was a beacon of hope to me. . . . [I]t was so crazy, it just might work. I took my cue and ran with it, registering the domain that night, designing the structure of the organization, writing the first version of the web site, and, along with my co-conspirators, explaining to room after room of Netscape employees and managers how free software worked, and what we had to do to make it work."97 For Zawinski, the decision was both a chance for Netscape to return to its glory and an opportunity [pg 107] to prove the power of Free Software: "I saw it as a chance for the code to actually prosper. By making it not be a Netscape project, but rather, be a public project to which Netscape was merely a contributor, the fact that Netscape was no longer capable of building products wouldn't matter: the outsiders would show Netscape how it's done. By putting control of the web browser into the hands of anyone who cared to step up to the task, we would ensure that those people would keep it going, out of their own self-interest."98 97 Jamie Zawinski, "resignation and postmortem," 31 March 1999, <http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html>. 98 Ibid. 320 But this promise didn't come true—or, at least, it didn't come true at the speed that Zawinski and others in the software world were used to. Zawinski offered various reasons: the project was primarily made up of Netscape employees and thus still appeared to be a Netscape thing; it was too large a project for outsiders to dive into and make small changes to; the code was too "crufty," that is, too complicated, overwritten, and unclean. Perhaps most important, though, the source code was not actually working: "We never distributed the source code to a working web browser, more importantly, to the web browser that people were actually using."99 99 Ibid. 321 Netscape failed to entice. As Zawinski put it, "If someone were running a web browser, then stopped, added a simple new command to the source, recompiled, and had that same web browser plus their addition, they would be motivated to do this again, and possibly to tackle even larger projects."100 For Zawinski, the failure to "ship" a working browser was the biggest failure, and he took pains to suggest that this failure was not an indictment of Free Software as such: "Let me assure you that whatever problems the Mozilla project is having are not because open source doesn't work. Open source does work, but it is most definitely not a panacea. If there's a cautionary tale here, it is that you can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of ‘ open source,' and have everything magically work out. Software is hard. The issues aren't that simple."101 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. 322 Fomenting Movements The period from 1 April 1998, when the Mozilla source code was first released, to 1 April 1999, when Zawinski announced its failure, couldn't have been a headier, more exciting time for participants in Free Software. Netscape's decision to release the source code was a tremendous opportunity for geeks involved in Free Software. It came in the midst of the rollicking dotcom bubble. It also came in the midst of the widespread adoption of [pg 108] key Free Software tools: the Linux operating system for servers, the Apache Web server for Web pages, the perl and python scripting languages for building quick Internet applications, and a number of other lower-level tools like Bind (an implementation of the DNS protocol) or sendmail for e-mail. 323 Perhaps most important, Netscape's decision came in a period of fevered and intense self-reflection among people who had been involved in Free Software in some way, stretching back to the mid-1980s. Eric Raymond's article "The Cathedral and The Bazaar," delivered at the Linux Kongress in 1997 and the O'Reilly Perl Conference the same year, had started a buzz among Free Software hackers. It was cited by Frank Hecker and Eric Hahn at Netscape as one of the sources for their thinking about the decision to free Mozilla; Raymond and Bruce Perens had both been asked to consult with Netscape on Free Software strategy. In April of the same year Tim O'Reilly, a publisher of handbooks for Free Software, organized a conference called the Freeware Summit. 324 The Freeware Summit's very name indicated some of the concern about definition and direction. Stallman, despite his obvious centrality, but also because of it, was not invited to the Freeware Summit, and the Free Software Foundation was not held up as the core philosophical guide of this event. Rather, according to the press release distributed after the meeting, "The meeting's purpose was to facilitate a high-level discussion of the successes and challenges facing the developers. While this type of software has often been called ‘ freeware' or ‘ free software' in the past, the developers agreed that commercial development of the software is part of the picture, and that the terms ‘ open source' or ‘ sourceware' best describe the development method they support."102 102 "Open Source Pioneers Meet in Historic Summit," press release, 14 April 1998, O'Reilly Press, <http://press.oreilly.com/pub/pr/796>. 325 It was at this summit that Raymond's suggestion of "Open Source" as an alternative name was first publicly debated.103 Shortly thereafter, Raymond and Perens created the Open Source Initiative and penned "The Open Source Definition." All of this self-reflection was intended to capitalize on the waves of attention being directed at Free Software in the wake of Netscape's announcement. 103 See Hamerly and Paquin, "Freeing the Source." The story is elegantly related in Moody, Rebel Code, 182-204. Raymond gives Christine Petersen of the Foresight Institute credit for the term open source. 326 The motivations for these changes came from a variety of sources—ranging from a desire to be included in the dotcom boom to a powerful (ideological) resistance to being ideological. Linus Torvalds loudly proclaimed that the reason to do Free Software was because it was "fun"; others insisted that it made better business [pg 109] sense or that the stability of infrastructures like the Internet depended on a robust ability to improve them from any direction. But none of them questioned how Free Software got done or proposed to change it. 327 Raymond's paper "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" quickly became the most widely told story of how Open Source works and why it is important; it emphasizes the centrality of novel forms of coordination over the role of novel copyright licenses or practices of sharing source code. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" reports Raymond's experiments with Free Software (the bazaar model) and reflects on the difference between it and methodologies adopted by industry (the cathedral model). The paper does not truck with talk of freedom and has no denunciations of software hoarding à la Stallman. Significantly, it also has no discussion of issues of licensing. Being a hacker, however, Raymond did give his paper a "revision-history," which proudly displays revision 1.29, 9 February 1998: "Changed ‘ free software' to ‘ open source.'"104 104 From Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The changelog is available online only: <http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/>. 328 Raymond was determined to reject the philosophy of liberty that Stallman and the Free Software Foundation represented, but not in order to create a political movement of his own. Rather, Raymond (and the others at the Freeware Summit) sought to cash in on the rising tide of the Internet economy by turning the creation of Free Software into something that made more sense to investors, venture capitalists, and the stock-buying public. To Raymond, Stallman and the Free Software Foundation represented not freedom or liberty, but a kind of dogmatic, impossible communism. As Raymond was a committed libertarian, one might expect his core beliefs in the necessity of strong property rights to conflict with the strange communalism of Free Software—and, indeed, his rhetoric was focused on pragmatic, business-minded, profit-driven, and market-oriented uses of Free Software. For Raymond, the essentially interesting component of Free Software was not its enhancement of human liberty, but the innovation in software production that it represented (the "development model"). It was clear that Free Software achieved something amazing through a clever inversion of strong property rights, an inversion which could be expected to bring massive revenue in some other form, either through cost-cutting or, Netscape-style, through the stock market. 329 Raymond wanted the business world and the mainstream industry to recognize Free Software's potential, but he felt that Stallman's [pg 110] rhetoric was getting in the way. Stallman's insistence, for example, on calling corporate intellectual-property protection of software "hoarding" was doing more damage than good in terms of Free Software's acceptance among businesses, as a practice, if not exactly a product. 330 Raymond's papers channeled the frustration of an entire generation of Free Software hackers who may or may not have shared Stallman's dogmatic philosophical stance, but who nonetheless wanted to participate in the creation of Free Software. Raymond's paper, the Netscape announcement, and the Freeware Summit all played into a palpable anxiety: that in the midst of the single largest creation of paper wealth in U.S. history, those being enriched through Free Software and the Internet were not those who built it, who maintained it, or who got it. 331 The Internet giveaway was a conflict of propriety: hackers and geeks who had built the software that made it work, under the sign of making it free for all, were seeing that software generate untold wealth for people who had not built it (and furthermore, who had no intention of keeping it free for all). Underlying the creation of wealth was a commitment to a kind of permanent technical freedom—a moral order—not shared by those who were reaping the most profit. This anxiety regarding the expropriation of work (even if it had been a labor of love) was ramified by Netscape's announcement. 332 All through 1998 and 1999, buzz around Open Source built. Little-known companies such as Red Hat, VA Linux, Cygnus, Slackware, and SuSe, which had been providing Free Software support and services to customers, suddenly entered media and business consciousness. Articles in the mainstream press circulated throughout the spring and summer of 1998, often attempting to make sense of the name change and whether it meant a corresponding change in practice. A front-cover article in Forbes, which featured photos of Stallman, Larry Wall, Brian Behlendorf, and Torvalds (figure 2), was noncommittal, cycling between Free Software, Open Source, and Freeware.105 105 Josh McHugh, "For the Love of Hacking," Forbes, 10 August 1998, 94-100. 333 [2bits_03_02-100.png] *2 *2 "Peace, Love and Software," cover of Forbes, 10 August 1998. Used with permission of Forbes and Nathaniel Welch. 334 By early 1999, O'Reilly Press published Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, a hastily written but widely read book. It included a number of articles—this time including one by Stallman—that cobbled together the first widely available public history of Free Software, both the practice and the technologies [pg 111] involved. Kirk McKusick's article detailed the history of important technologies like the BSD version of UNIX, while an article by Brian Behlendorf, of Apache, detailed the practical challenges of running Free Software projects. Raymond provided a history of hackers and a self-aggrandizing article about his own importance in creating the movement, while Stallman's contribution told his own version of the rise of Free Software. 335 By December 1999, the buzz had reached a fever pitch. When VA Linux, a legitimate company which actually made something real—computers with Linux installed on them—went public, its shares' value gained 700 percent in one day and was the single [pg 112] most valuable initial public offering of the era. VA Linux took the unconventional step of allowing contributors to the Linux kernel to buy into the stock before the IPO, thus bringing at least a partial set of these contributors into the mainstream Ponzi scheme of the Internet dotcom economy. Those who managed to sell their stock ended up benefiting from the boom, whether or not their contributions to Free Software truly merited it. In a roundabout way, Raymond, O'Reilly, Perens, and others behind the name change had achieved recognition for the central role of Free Software in the success of the Internet—and now its true name could be known: Open Source. 336 Yet nothing much changed in terms of the way things actually got done. Sharing source code, conceiving openness, writing licenses, coordinating projects—all these continued as before with no significant differences between those flashing the heroic mantle of freedom and those donning the pragmatic tunic of methodology. Now, however, stories proliferated; definitions, distinctions, details, and detractions filled the ether of the Internet, ranging from the philosophical commitments of Free Software to the parables of science as the "original open source" software. Free Software proponents refined their message concerning rights, while Open Source advocates refined their claims of political agnosticism or nonideological commitments to "fun." All these stories served to create movements, to evangelize and advocate and, as Eugen Leitl would say, to "corrupt young minds" and convert them to the cause. The fact that there are different narratives for identical practices is an advantageous fact: regardless of why people think they are doing what they are doing, they are all nonetheless contributing to the same mysterious thing. 337 A Movement? 338 To most onlookers, Free Software and Open Source seem to be overwhelmed with frenzied argument; the flame wars and disputes, online and off, seem to dominate everything. To attend a conference where geeks—especially high-profile geeks like Raymond, Stallman, and Torvalds—are present, one might suspect that the very detailed practices of Free Software are overseen by the brow-beating, histrionic antics of a few charismatic leaders and that ideological commitments result in divergent, incompatible, and affect-laden [pg 113] opposition which must of necessity take specific and incompatible forms. Strangely, this is far from the case: all this sound and fury doesn't much change what people do, even if it is a requirement of apprenticeship. It truly is all over but for the shouting. 339 According to most of the scholarly literature, the function of a movement is to narrate the shared goals and to recruit new members. But is this what happens in Free Software or Open Source?106 To begin with, movement is an awkward word; not all participants would define their participation this way. Richard Stallman suggests that Free Software is social movement, while Open Source is a development methodology. Similarly some Open Source proponents see it as a pragmatic methodology and Free Software as a dogmatic philosophy. While there are specific entities like the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative, they do not comprise all Free Software or Open Source. Free Software and Open Source are neither corporations nor organizations nor consortia (for there are no organizations to consort); they are neither national, subnational, nor international; they are not "collectives" because no membership is required or assumed—indeed to hear someone assert "I belong" to Free Software or Open Source would sound absurd to anyone who does. Neither are they shady bands of hackers, crackers, or thieves meeting in the dead of night, which is to say that they are not an "informal" organization, because there is no formal equivalent to mimic or annul. Nor are they quite a crowd, for a crowd can attract participants who have no idea what the goal of the crowd is; also, crowds are temporary, while movements extend over time. It may be that movement is the best term of the lot, but unlike social movements, whose organization and momentum are fueled by shared causes or broken by ideological dispute, Free Software and Open Source share practices first, and ideologies second. It is this fact that is the strongest confirmation that they are a recursive public, a form of public that is as concerned with the material practical means of becoming public as it is with any given public debate. 106 On social movements—the closest analog, developed long ago—see Gerlach and Hine, People, Power, Change, and Freeman and Johnson, Waves of Protest. However, the Free Software and Open Source Movements do not have "causes" of the kind that conventional movements do, other than the perpetuation of Free and Open Source Software (see Coleman, "Political Agnosticism"; Chan, "Coding Free Software"). Similarly, there is no single development methodology that would cover only Open Source. Advocates of Open Source are all too willing to exclude those individuals or organizations who follow the same "development methodology" but do not use a Free Software license—such as Microsoft's oft-mocked "shared-source" program. The list of licenses approved by both the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative is substantially the same. Further, the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the "Open Source Definition" are almost identical (compare <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html> with <http://www.opensource.org/licenses/> [both accessed 30 June 2006]). 340 The movement, as a practice of argument and discussion, is thus centered around core agreements about the other four kinds of practices. The discussion and argument have a specific function: to tie together divergent practices according to a wide consensus which tries to capture the why of Free Software. Why is it different from normal software development? Why is it necessary? Why now? [pg 114] Why do people do it? Why do people use it? Can it be preserved and enhanced? None of these questions address the how: how should source code circulate? How should a license be written? Who should be in charge? All of these "hows" change slowly and experimentally through the careful modulation of the practices, but the "whys" are turbulent and often distracting. Nonetheless, people engaged in Free Software—users, developers, supporters, and observers—could hardly remain silent on this point, despite the frequent demand to just "shut up and show me the code." "Figuring out" Free Software also requires a practice of reflecting on what is central to it and what is outside of it. 341 The movement, as a practice of discussion and argument, is made up of stories. It is a practice of storytelling: affect- and intellect-laden lore that orients existing participants toward a particular problem, contests other histories, parries attacks from outside, and draws in new recruits.107 This includes proselytism and evangelism (and the usable pasts of protestant reformations, singularities, rebellion and iconoclasm are often salient here), whether for the reform of intellectual-property law or for the adoption of Linux in the trenches of corporate America. It includes both heartfelt allegiance in the name of social justice as well as political agnosticism stripped of all ideology.108 Every time Free Software is introduced to someone, discussed in the media, analyzed in a scholarly work, or installed in a workplace, a story of either Free Software or Open Source is used to explain its purpose, its momentum, and its temporality. At the extremes are the prophets and proselytes themselves: Eric Raymond describes Open Source as an evolutionarily necessary outcome of the natural tendency of human societies toward economies of abundance, while Richard Stallman describes it as a defense of the fundamental freedoms of creativity and speech, using a variety of philosophical theories of liberty, justice, and the defense of freedom.109 Even scholarly analyses must begin with a potted history drawn from the self-narration of geeks who make or advocate free software.110 Indeed, as a methodological aside, one reason it is so easy to track such stories and narratives is because geeks like to tell and, more important, like to archive such stories—to create Web pages, definitions, encyclopedia entries, dictionaries, and mini-histories and to save every scrap of correspondence, every fight, and every resolution related to their activities. This "archival hubris" yields a very peculiar and specific kind of fieldsite: one in which a kind [pg 115] of "as-it-happens" ethnographic observation is possible not only through "being there" in the moment but also by being there in the massive, proliferating archives of moments past. Understanding the movement as a changing entity requires constantly glancing back at its future promises and the conditions of their making. 107 It is, in the terms of Actor Network Theory, a process of "enrollment" in which participants find ways to rhetorically align—and to disalign—their interests. It does not constitute the substance of their interest, however. See Latour, Science in Action; Callon, "Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation." 108 Coleman, "Political Agnosticism." 109 See, respectively, Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and Williams, Free as in Freedom. 110 For example, Castells, The Internet Galaxy, and Weber, The Success of Open Source both tell versions of the same story of origins and development. 342 Stories of the movement are also stories of a recursive public. The fact that movement isn't quite the right word is evidence of a kind of grasping, a figuring out of why these practices make sense to all these geeks, in this place and time; it is a practice that is not so different from my own ethnographic engagement with it. Note that both Free Software and Open Source tell stories of movement(s): they are not divided by a commercial-noncommercial line, even if they are divided by ill-defined and hazy notions of their ultimate goals. The problem of a recursive public (or, in an alternate language, a recursive market) as a social imaginary of moral and technical order is common to both of them as part of their practices. Thus, stories about "the movement" are detailed stories about the technical and moral order that geeks inhabit, and they are bound up with the functions and fates of the Internet. Often these stories are themselves practices of inclusion and exclusion (e.g., "this license is not a Free Software license" or "that software is not an open system"); sometimes the stories are normative definitions about how Free Software should look. But they are, always, stories that reveal the shared moral and technical imaginations that make up Free Software as a recursive public. 343 Conclusion 344 Before 1998, there was no movement. There was the Free Software Foundation, with its peculiar goals, and a very wide array of other projects, people, software, and ideas. Then, all of a sudden, in the heat of the dotcom boom, Free Software was a movement. Suddenly, it was a problem, a danger, a job, a calling, a dogma, a solution, a philosophy, a liberation, a methodology, a business plan, a success, and an alternative. Suddenly, it was Open Source or Free Software, and it became necessary to choose sides. After 1998, debates about definition exploded; denunciations and manifestos and journalistic hagiography proliferated. Ironically, the creation of two names allowed people to identify one thing, for [pg 116] these two names referred to identical practices, licenses, tools, and organizations. Free Software and Open Source shared everything "material," but differed vocally and at great length with respect to ideology. Stallman was denounced as a kook, a communist, an idealist, and a dogmatic holding back the successful adoption of Open Source by business; Raymond and users of "open source" were charged with selling out the ideals of freedom and autonomy, with the dilution of the principles and the promise of Free Software, as well as with being stooges of capitalist domination. Meanwhile, both groups proceeded to create objects—principally software—using tools that they agreed on, concepts of openness that they agreed on, licenses that they agreed on, and organizational schemes that they agreed on. Yet never was there fiercer debate about the definition of Free Software. 345 On the one hand, the Free Software Foundation privileges the liberty and creativity of individual geeks, geeks engaged in practices of self-fashioning through the creation of software. It gives precedence to the liberal claim that without freedom of expression, individuals are robbed of their ability to self-determine. On the other hand, Open Source privileges organizations and processes, that is, geeks who are engaged in building businesses, nonprofit organizations, or governmental and public organizations of some form or another. It gives precedence to the pragmatist (or polymathic) view that getting things done requires flexible principles and negotiation, and that the public practice of building and running things should be separate from the private practice of ethical and political beliefs. Both narratives give geeks ways of making sense of a practice that they share in almost all of its details; both narratives give geeks a way to understand how Free Software or Open Source Software is different from the mainstream, proprietary software development that dominates their horizons. The narratives turn the haphazard participation and sharing that existed before 1998 into meaningful, goal-directed practices in the present, turning a class-in-itself into a class-for-itself, to use a terminology for the most part unwelcome among geeks. 346 If two radically opposed ideologies can support people engaged in identical practices, then it seems obvious that the real space of politics and contestation is at the level of these practices and their emergence. These practices emerge as a response to a reorientation of power and knowledge, a reorientation somewhat impervious to [pg 117] conventional narratives of freedom and liberty, or to pragmatic claims of methodological necessity or market-driven innovation. Were these conventional narratives sufficient, the practices would be merely bureaucratic affairs, rather than the radical transformations they are. 347 4. Sharing Source Code 348 Free Software would be nothing without shared source code. The idea is built into the very name "Open Source," and it is a requirement of all Free Software licenses that source code be open to view, not "welded shut." Perhaps ironically, source code is the most material of the five components of Free Software; it is both an expressive medium, like writing or speech, and a tool that performs concrete actions. It is a mnemonic that translates between the illegible electron-speed doings of our machines and our lingering ability to partially understand and control them as human agents. Many Free Software programmers and advocates suggest that "information wants to be free" and that sharing is a natural condition of human life, but I argue something contrary: sharing produces its own kind of moral and technical order, that is, "information makes people want freedom" and how they want it is related to how that information is created and circulated. In this chapter I explore the [pg 119] twisted and contingent history of how source code and its sharing have come to take the technical, legal, and pedagogical forms they have today, and how the norms of sharing have come to seem so natural to geeks. 349 Source code is essential to Free Software because of the historically specific ways in which it has come to be shared, "ported," and "forked." Nothing about the nature of source code requires that it be shared, either by corporations for whom secrecy and jealous protection are the norm or by academics and geeks for whom source code is usually only one expression, or implementation, of a greater idea worth sharing. However, in the last thirty years, norms of sharing source code—technical, legal, and pedagogical norms—have developed into a seemingly natural practice. They emerged through attempts to make software into a product, such as IBM's 1968 "unbundling" of software and hardware, through attempts to define and control it legally through trade secret, copyright, and patent law, and through attempts to teach engineers how to understand and to create more software. 350 The story of the norms of sharing source code is, not by accident, also the history of the UNIX operating system.111 The UNIX operating system is a monstrous academic-corporate hybrid, an experiment in portability and sharing whose impact is widely and reverently acknowledged by geeks, but underappreciated more generally. The story of UNIX demonstrates the details of how source code has come to be shared, technically, legally, and pedagogically. In technical terms UNIX and the programming language C in which it was written demonstrated several key ideas in operating-systems theory and practice, and they led to the widespread "porting" of UNIX to virtually every kind of hardware available in the 1970s, all around the world. In legal terms UNIX's owner, AT&T, licensed it widely and liberally, in both binary and source-code form; the legal definition of UNIX as a product, however, was not the same as the technical definition of UNIX as an evolving experiment in portable operating systems—a tension that has continued throughout its lifetime. In pedagogical terms UNIX became the very paradigm of an "operating system" and was thereby ported not only in the technical sense from one machine to another, but from machines to minds, as computer-science students learning the meaning of "operating system" studied the details of the quasi-legally shared UNIX source code.112 111 "Sharing" source code is not the only kind of sharing among geeks (e.g., informal sharing to communicate ideas), and UNIX is not the only [pg 324] shared software. Other examples that exhibit this kind of proliferation (e.g., the LISP programming language, the TeX text-formatting system) are as ubiquitous as UNIX today. The inverse of my argument here is that selling produces a different kind of order: many products that existed in much larger numbers than UNIX have since disappeared because they were never ported or forked; they are now part of dead-computer museums and collections, if they have survived at all. 112 The story of UNIX has not been told, and yet it has been told hundreds of thousands of times. Every hacker, programmer, computer scientist, and geek tells a version of UNIX history—a usable past. Thus, the sources for this chapter include these stories, heard and recorded throughout my fieldwork, but also easily accessible in academic work on Free Software, which enthusiastically participates in this potted-history retailing. See, for example, Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source; Castells, The Internet Galaxy; Himanen, The Hacker Ethic; Benkler, The Wealth of Networks. To date there is but one detailed history of UNIX—A Quarter Century of UNIX, by Peter Salus—which I rely on extensively. Matt Ratto's dissertation, "The Pressure of Openness," also contains an excellent analytic history of the events told in this chapter. 351 The proliferation of UNIX was also a hybrid commercial-academic undertaking: it was neither a "public domain" object shared solely among academics, nor was it a conventional commercial product. Proliferation occurred through novel forms of academic sharing as well as through licensing schemes constrained by the peculiar status of AT&T, a regulated monopoly forbidden to enter the computer and software industry before 1984. Thus proliferation was not mere replication: it was not the sale of copies of UNIX, but a complex web of shared and re-shared chunks of source code, and the reimplementation of an elegant and simple conceptual scheme. As UNIX proliferated, it was stabilized in multiple ways: by academics seeking to keep it whole and self-compatible through contributions of source code; by lawyers at AT&T seeking to define boundaries that mapped onto laws, licenses, versions, and regulations; and by professors seeking to define it as an exemplar of the core concepts of operating-system theory. In all these ways, UNIX was a kind of primal recursive public, drawing together people for whom the meaning of their affiliation was the use, modification, and stabilization of UNIX. 352 The obverse of proliferation is differentiation: forking. UNIX is admired for its integrity as a conceptual thing and despised (or marveled at) for its truly tangled genealogical tree of ports and forks: new versions of UNIX, some based directly on the source code, some not, some licensed directly from AT&T, some sublicensed or completely independent. 353 Forking, like random mutation, has had both good and bad effects; on the one hand, it ultimately created versions of UNIX that were not compatible with themselves (a kind of autoimmune response), but it also allowed the merger of UNIX and the Arpanet, creating a situation wherein UNIX operating systems came to be not only the paradigm of operating systems but also the paradigm of networked computers, through its intersection with the development of the TCP/IP protocols that are at the core of the Internet.113 By the mid-1980s, UNIX was a kind of obligatory passage point for anyone interested in networking, operating systems, the Internet, and especially, modes of creating, sharing, and modifying source code—so much so that UNIX has become known among geeks not just as an operating system but as a philosophy, an answer to a very old question in new garb: how shall we live, among a new world of machines, software, and networks? 113 The intersection of UNIX and TCP/IP occurred around 1980 and led to the famous switch from the Network Control Protocol (NCP) to the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol that occurred on 1 January 1983 (see Salus, Casting the Net). 354 Before Source 355 In the early days of computing machinery, there was no such thing as source code. Alan Turing purportedly liked to talk to the machine in binary. Grace Hopper, who invented an early compiler, worked as close to the Harvard Mark I as she could get: flipping switches and plugging and unplugging relays that made up the "code" of what the machine would do. Such mechanical and meticulous work hardly merits the terms reading and writing; there were no GOTO statements, no line numbers, only calculations that had to be translated from the pseudo-mathematical writing of engineers and human computers to a physical or mechanical configuration.114 Writing and reading source code and programming languages was a long, slow development that became relatively widespread only by the mid-1970s. So-called higher-level languages began to appear in the late 1950s: FORTRAN, COBOL, Algol, and the "compilers" which allowed for programs written in them to be transformed into the illegible mechanical and valvular representations of the machine. It was in this era that the terms source language and target language emerged to designate the activity of translating higher to lower level languages.115 114 Light, "When Computers Were Women"; Grier, When Computers Were Human. 115 There is a large and growing scholarly history of software: Wexelblat, History of Programming Languages and Bergin and Gibson, History of Programming Languages 2 are collected papers by historians and participants. Key works in history include Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog; Akera and Nebeker, From 0 to 1; Hashagen, Keil-Slawik, and Norberg, History of Computing—Software Issues; Donald A. MacKenzie, Mechanizing Proof. Michael Mahoney has written by far the most about the early history of software; his relevant works include "The Roots of Software Engineering," "The Structures of Computation," "In Our Own Image," and "Finding a History for Software Engineering." On UNIX in particular, there is shockingly little historical work. Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray devote a mere two pages in their general history Computer. As early as 1978, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were reflecting on the "history" of UNIX in "The UNIX Time-Sharing System: A Retrospective." Ritchie maintains a Web site that contains a valuable collection of early documents and his own reminiscences (<http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/> [pg 325] ). Mahoney has also conducted interviews with the main participants in the development of UNIX at Bell Labs. These interviews have not been published anywhere, but are drawn on as background in this chapter (interviews are in Mahoney's personal files). 356 There is a certain irony about the computer, not often noted: the unrivaled power of the computer, if the ubiquitous claims are believed, rests on its general programmability; it can be made to do any calculation, in principle. The so-called universal Turing machine provides the mathematical proof.116 Despite the abstract power of such certainty, however, we do not live in the world of The Computer—we live in a world of computers. The hardware systems that manufacturers created from the 1950s onward were so specific and idiosyncratic that it was inconceivable that one might write a program for one machine and then simply run it on another. "Programming" became a bespoke practice, tailored to each new machine, and while programmers of a particular machine may well have shared programs with each other, they would not have seen much point in sharing with users of a different machine. Likewise, computer scientists shared mathematical descriptions of algorithms and ideas for automation with as much enthusiasm as corporations jealously guarded theirs, but this sharing, or secrecy, did not extend to the sharing of the program itself. The need to "rewrite" a program for each machine was not just a historical accident, but [pg 122] was determined by the needs of designers and engineers and the vicissitudes of the market for such expensive machines.117 116 Turing, "On Computable Numbers." See also Davis, Engines of Logic, for a basic explanation. 117 Sharing programs makes sense in this period only in terms of user groups such as SHARE (IBM) and USE (DEC). These groups were indeed sharing source code and sharing programs they had written (see Akera, "Volunteerism and the Fruits of Collaboration"), but they were constituted around specific machines and manufacturers; brand loyalty and customization were familiar pursuits, but sharing source code across dissimilar computers was not. 357 In the good old days of computers-the-size-of-rooms, the languages that humans used to program computers were mnemonics; they did not exist in the computer, but on a piece of paper or a specially designed code sheet. The code sheet gave humans who were not Alan Turing a way to keep track of, to share with other humans, and to think systematically about the invisible light-speed calculations of a complicated device. Such mnemonics needed to be "coded" on punch cards or tape; if engineers conferred, they conferred over sheets of paper that matched up with wires, relays, and switches—or, later, printouts of the various machine-specific codes that represented program and data. 358 With the introduction of programming languages, the distinction between a "source" language and a "target" language entered the practice: source languages were "translated" into the illegible target language of the machine. Such higher-level source languages were still mnemonics of sorts—they were certainly easier for humans to read and write, mostly on yellowing tablets of paper or special code sheets—but they were also structured enough that a source language could be input into a computer and translated into a target language which the designers of the hardware had specified. Inputting commands and cards and source code required a series of actions specific to each machine: a particular card reader or, later, a keypunch with a particular "editor" for entering the commands. Properly input and translated source code provided the machine with an assembled binary program that would, in fact, run (calculate, operate, control). It was a separation, an abstraction that allowed for a certain division of labor between the ingenious human authors and the fast and mechanical translating machines. 359 Even after the invention of programming languages, programming "on" a computer—sitting at a glowing screen and hacking through the night—was still a long time in coming. For example, only by about 1969 was it possible to sit at a keyboard, write source code, instruct the computer to compile it, then run the program—all without leaving the keyboard—an activity that was all but unimaginable in the early days of "batch processing."118 Very few programmers worked in such a fashion before the mid-1970s, when text editors that allowed programmers to see the text on a screen rather [pg 123] than on a piece of paper started to proliferate.119 We are, by now, so familiar with the image of the man or woman sitting at a screen interacting with this device that it is nearly impossible to imagine how such a seemingly obvious practice was achieved in the first place—through the slow accumulation of the tools and techniques for working on a new kind of writing—and how that practice exploded into a Babel of languages and machines that betrayed the promise of the general-purpose computing machine. 118 See Waldrop, The Dream Machine, 142-47. 119 A large number of editors were created in the 1970s; Richard Stallman's EMACS and Bill Joy's vi remain the most well known. Douglas Engelbart is somewhat too handsomely credited with the creation of the interactive computer, but the work of Butler Lampson and Peter Deutsch in Berkeley, as well as that of the Multics team, Ken Thompson, and others on early on-screen editors is surely more substantial in terms of the fundamental ideas and problems of manipulating text files on a screen. This story is largely undocumented, save for in the computer-science literature itself. On Engelbart, see Bardini, Bootstrapping. 360 The proliferation of different machines with different architectures drove a desire, among academics especially, for the standardization of programming languages, not so much because any single language was better than another, but because it seemed necessary to most engineers and computer users to share an emerging corpus of algorithms, solutions, and techniques of all kinds, necessary to avoid reinventing the wheel with each new machine. Algol, a streamlined language suited to algorithmic and algebraic representations, emerged in the early 1960s as a candidate for international standardization. Other languages competed on different strengths: FORTRAN and COBOL for general business use; LISP for symbolic processing. At the same time, the desire for a standard "higher-level" language necessitated a bestiary of translating programs: compilers, parsers, lexical analyzers, and other tools designed to transform the higher-level (human-readable) language into a machine-specific lower-level language, that is, machine language, assembly language, and ultimately the mystical zeroes and ones that course through our machines. The idea of a standard language and the necessity of devising specific tools for translation are the origin of the problem of portability: the ability to move software—not just good ideas, but actual programs, written in a standard language—from one machine to another. 361 A standard source language was seen as a way to counteract the proliferation of different machines with subtly different architectures. Portable source code would allow programmers to imagine their programs as ships, stopping in at ports of call, docking on different platforms, but remaining essentially mobile and unchanged by these port-calls. Portable source code became the Esperanto of humans who had wrought their own Babel of tribal hardware machines. 362 Meanwhile, for the computer industry in the 1960s, portable source code was largely a moot point. Software and hardware were [pg 124] two sides of single, extremely expensive coin—no one, except engineers, cared what language the code was in, so long as it performed the task at hand for the customer. Each new machine needed to be different, faster, and, at first, bigger, and then smaller, than the last. The urge to differentiate machines from each other was not driven by academic experiment or aesthetic purity, but by a demand for marketability, competitive advantage, and the transformation of machines and software into products. Each machine had to do something really well, and it needed to be developed in secret, in order to beat out the designs and innovations of competitors. In the 1950s and 1960s the software was a core component of this marketable object; it was not something that in itself was differentiated or separately distributed—until IBM's famous decision in 1968 to "unbundle" software and hardware. 363 Before the 1970s, employees of a computer corporation wrote software in-house. The machine was the product, and the software was just an extra line-item on the invoice. IBM was not the first to conceive of software as an independent product with its own market, however. Two companies, Informatics and Applied Data Research, had explored the possibilities of a separate market in software.120 Informatics, in particular, developed the first commercially successful software product, a business-management system called Mark IV, which in 1967 cost $30,000. Informatics' president Walter Bauer "later recalled that potential buyers were ‘ astounded' by the price of Mark IV. In a world accustomed to free software the price of $30,000 was indeed high."121 120 See Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog. 121 Ibid., 107. 364 IBM's unbundling decision marked a watershed, the point at which "portable" source code became a conceivable idea, if not a practical reality, to many in the industry.122 Rather than providing a complete package of hardware and software, IBM decided to differentiate its products: to sell software and hardware separately to consumers.123 But portability was not simply a technical issue; it was a political-economic one as well. IBM's decision was driven both by its desire to create IBM software that ran on all IBM machines (a central goal of the famous OS/360 project overseen and diagnosed by Frederick Brooks) and as response to an antitrust suit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice.124 The antitrust suit included as part of its claims the suggestion that the close tying of software and hardware represented a form of monopolistic behavior, and it prompted IBM to consider strategies to "unbundle" its product. 122 Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer, 203-5. 123 Ultimately, the Department of Justice case against IBM used bundling as evidence of monopolistic behavior, in addition to claims about the creation of so-called Plug Compatible Machines, devices that were reverse-engineered by meticulously constructing both the mechanical interface and the software that would communicate with IBM mainframes. See Franklin M. Fischer, Folded, Spindled, and Mutilated; Brock, The Second Information Revolution. 124 The story of this project and the lessons Brooks learned are the subject of one of the most famous software-development handbooks, The Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick Brooks. 365 Portability in the business world meant something specific, however. Even if software could be made portable at a technical level—transferable between two different IBM machines—this was certainly no guarantee that it would be portable between customers. One company's accounting program, for example, may not suit another's practices. Portability was therefore hindered both by the diversity of machine architectures and by the diversity of business practices and organization. IBM and other manufacturers therefore saw no benefit to standardizing source code, as it could only provide an advantage to competitors.125 125 The computer industry has always relied heavily on trade secret, much less so on patent and copyright. Trade secret also produces its own form of order, access, and circulation, which was carried over into the early software industry as well. See Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine for a classic account of secrecy and competition in the computer industry. 366 Portability was thus not simply a technical problem—the problem of running one program on multiple architectures—but also a kind of political-economic problem. The meaning of product was not always the same as the meaning of hardware or software, but was usually some combination of the two. At that early stage, the outlines of a contest over the meaning of portable or shareable source code are visible, both in the technical challenges of creating high-level languages and in the political-economic challenges that corporations faced in creating distinctive proprietary products. 367 The UNIX Time-Sharing System 368 Set against this backdrop, the invention, success, and proliferation of the UNIX operating system seems quite monstrous, an aberration of both academic and commercial practice that should have failed in both realms, instead of becoming the most widely used portable operating system in history and the very paradigm of an "operating system" in general. The story of UNIX demonstrates how portability became a reality and how the particular practice of sharing UNIX source code became a kind of de facto standard in its wake. 369 UNIX was first written in 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Telephone Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. UNIX was the dénouement of the MIT project Multics, which Bell Labs had funded in part and to which Ken Thompson had been assigned. Multics was one of the earliest complete time-sharing operating systems, a demonstration platform for a number of early innovations in time-sharing (multiple simultaneous users on one computer).126 By 1968, Bell Labs had pulled its support—including Ken Thompson—from the project and placed him back in Murray Hill, where he and [pg 126] Dennis Ritchie were stuck without a machine, without any money, and without a project. They were specialists in operating systems, languages, and machine architecture in a research group that had no funding or mandate to pursue these areas. Through the creative use of some discarded equipment, and in relative isolation from the rest of the lab, Thompson and Ritchie created, in the space of about two years, a complete operating system, a programming language called C, and a host of tools that are still in extremely wide use today. The name UNIX (briefly, UNICS) was, among other things, a puerile pun: a castrated Multics. 126 On time sharing, see Lee et al., "Project MAC." Multics makes an appearance in nearly all histories of computing, the best resource by far being Tom van Vleck's Web site <http://www.multicians.org/>. 370 The absence of an economic or corporate mandate for Thompson's and Ritchie's creativity and labor was not unusual for Bell Labs; researchers were free to work on just about anything, so long as it possessed some kind of vague relation to the interests of AT&T. However, the lack of funding for a more powerful machine did restrict the kind of work Thompson and Ritchie could accomplish. In particular, it influenced the design of the system, which was oriented toward a super-slim control unit (a kernel) that governed the basic operation of the machine and an expandable suite of small, independent tools, each of which did one thing well and which could be strung together to accomplish more complex and powerful tasks.127 With the help of Joseph Ossana, Douglas McIlroy, and others, Thompson and Ritchie eventually managed to agitate for a new PDP-11/20 based not on the technical merits of the UNIX operating system itself, but on its potential applications, in particular, those of the text-preparation group, who were interested in developing tools for formatting, typesetting, and printing, primarily for the purpose of creating patent applications, which was, for Bell Labs, and for AT&T more generally, obviously a laudable goal.128 127 Some widely admired technical innovations (many of which were borrowed from Multics) include: the hierarchical file system, the command shell for interacting with the system; the decision to treat everything, including external devices, as the same kind of entity (a file), the "pipe" operator which allowed the output of one tool to be "piped" as input to another tool, facilitating the easy creation of complex tasks from simple tools. 128 Salus, A Quarter Century of UNIX, 33-37. 371 UNIX was unique for many technical reasons, but also for a specific economic reason: it was never quite academic and never quite commercial. Martin Campbell-Kelly notes that UNIX was a "non-proprietary operating system of major significance."129 Kelly's use of "non-proprietary" is not surprising, but it is incorrect. Although business-speak regularly opposed open to proprietary throughout the 1980s and early 1990s (and UNIX was definitely the former), Kelly's slip marks clearly the confusion between software ownership and software distribution that permeates both popular and academic understandings. UNIX was indeed proprietary—it was copyrighted and wholly owned by Bell Labs and in turn by Western Electric [pg 127] and AT&T—but it was not exactly commercialized or marketed by them. Instead, AT&T allowed individuals and corporations to install UNIX and to create UNIX-like derivatives for very low licensing fees. Until about 1982, UNIX was licensed to academics very widely for a very small sum: usually royalty-free with a minimal service charge (from about $150 to $800).130 The conditions of this license allowed researchers to do what they liked with the software so long as they kept it secret: they could not distribute or use it outside of their university labs (or use it to create any commercial product or process), nor publish any part of it. As a result, throughout the 1970s UNIX was developed both by Thompson and Ritchie inside Bell Labs and by users around the world in a relatively informal manner. Bell Labs followed such a liberal policy both because it was one of a small handful of industry-academic research and development centers and because AT&T was a government monopoly that provided phone service to the country and was therefore forbidden to directly enter the computer software market.131 129 Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog, 143. 130 Ritchie's Web site contains a copy of a 1974 license (<http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/licenses.html)> and a series of ads that exemplify the uneasy positioning of UNIX as a commercial product (<http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/unixad.html)>. According to Don Libes and Sandy Ressler, "The original licenses were source licenses. . . . [C]ommercial institutions paid fees on the order of $20,000. If you owned more than one machine, you had to buy binary licenses for every additional machine [i.e., you were not allowed to copy the source and install it] you wanted to install UNIX on. They were fairly pricey at $8000, considering you couldn't resell them. On the other hand, educational institutions could buy source licenses for several hundred dollars—just enough to cover Bell Labs' administrative overhead and the cost of the tapes" (Life with UNIX, 20-21). 131 According to Salus, this licensing practice was also a direct result of Judge Thomas Meaney's 1956 antitrust consent decree which required AT&T to reveal and to license its patents for nominal fees (A Quarter Century of UNIX, 56); see also Brock, The Second Information Revolution, 116-20. 372 Being on the border of business and academia meant that UNIX was, on the one hand, shielded from the demands of management and markets, allowing it to achieve the conceptual integrity that made it so appealing to designers and academics. On the other, it also meant that AT&T treated it as a potential product in the emerging software industry, which included new legal questions from a changing intellectual-property regime, novel forms of marketing and distribution, and new methods of developing, supporting, and distributing software. 373 Despite this borderline status, UNIX was a phenomenal success. The reasons why UNIX was so popular are manifold; it was widely admired aesthetically, for its size, and for its clever design and tools. But the fact that it spread so widely and quickly is testament also to the existing community of eager computer scientists and engineers (and a few amateurs) onto which it was bootstrapped, users for whom a powerful, flexible, low-cost, modifiable, and fast operating system was a revelation of sorts. It was an obvious alternative to the complex, poorly documented, buggy operating systems that routinely shipped standard with the machines that universities and research organizations purchased. "It worked," in other words. 374 A key feature of the popularity of UNIX was the inclusion of the source code. When Bell Labs licensed UNIX, they usually provided a tape that contained the documentation (i.e., documentation that [pg 128] was part of the system, not a paper technical manual external to it), a binary version of the software, and the source code for the software. The practice of distributing the source code encouraged people to maintain it, extend it, document it—and to contribute those changes to Thompson and Ritchie as well. By doing so, users developed an interest in maintaining and supporting the project precisely because it gave them an opportunity and the tools to use their computer creatively and flexibly. Such a globally distributed community of users organized primarily by their interest in maintaining an operating system is a precursor to the recursive public, albeit confined to the world of computer scientists and researchers with access to still relatively expensive machines. As such, UNIX was not only a widely shared piece of quasi-commercial software (i.e., distributed in some form other than through a price-based retail market), but also the first to systematically include the source code as part of that distribution as well, thus appealing more to academics and engineers.132 132 Even in computer science, source code was rarely formally shared, and more likely presented in the form of theorems and proofs, or in various idealized higher-level languages such as Donald Knuth's MIX language for presenting algorithms (Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming). Snippets of actual source code are much more likely to be found in printed form in handbooks, manuals, how-to guides, and other professional publications aimed at training programmers. 375 Throughout the 1970s, the low licensing fees, the inclusion of the source code, and its conceptual integrity meant that UNIX was ported to a remarkable number of other machines. In many ways, academics found it just as appealing, if not more, to be involved in the creation and improvement of a cutting-edge system by licensing and porting the software themselves, rather than by having it provided to them, without the source code, by a company. Peter Salus, for instance, suggests that people experienced the lack of support from Bell Labs as a kind of spur to develop and share their own fixes. The means by which source code was shared, and the norms and practices of sharing, porting, forking, and modifying source code were developed in this period as part of the development of UNIX itself—the technical design of the system facilitates and in some cases mirrors the norms and practices of sharing that developed: operating systems and social systems.133 133 The simultaneous development of the operating system and the norms for creating, sharing, documenting, and extending it are often referred to as the "UNIX philosophy." It includes the central idea that one should build on the ideas (software) of others (see Gancarz, The Unix Philosophy and Linux and the UNIX Philosophy). See also Raymond, The Art of UNIX Programming. 376 Sharing UNIX 377 Over the course of 1974-77 the spread and porting of UNIX was phenomenal for an operating system that had no formal system of distribution and no official support from the company that owned it, and that evolved in a piecemeal way through the contributions [pg 129] of people from around the world. By 1975, a user's group had developed: USENIX.134 UNIX had spread to Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan, and a number of new tools and applications were being both independently circulated and, significantly, included in the frequent releases by Bell Labs itself. All during this time, AT&T's licensing department sought to find a balance between allowing this circulation and innovation to continue, and attempting to maintain trade-secret status for the software. UNIX was, by 1980, without a doubt the most widely and deeply understood trade secret in computing history. 134 Bell Labs threatened the nascent UNIX NEWS newsletter with trademark infringement, so "USENIX" was a concession that harkened back to the original USE users' group for DEC machines, but avoided explicitly using the name UNIX. Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 9. 378 The manner in which the circulation of and contribution to UNIX occurred is not well documented, but it includes both technical and pedagogical forms of sharing. On the technical side, distribution took a number of forms, both in resistance to AT&T's attempts to control it and facilitated by its unusually liberal licensing of the software. On the pedagogical side, UNIX quickly became a paradigmatic object for computer-science students precisely because it was a working operating system that included the source code and that was simple enough to explore in a semester or two. 379 In A Quarter Century of UNIX Salus provides a couple of key stories (from Ken Thompson and Lou Katz) about how exactly the technical sharing of UNIX worked, how sharing, porting, and forking can be distinguished, and how it was neither strictly legal nor deliberately illegal in this context. First, from Ken Thompson: "The first thing to realize is that the outside world ran on releases of UNIX (V4, V5, V6, V7) but we did not. Our view was a continuum. V5 was what we had at some point in time and was probably out of date simply by the activity required to put it in shape to export. After V6, I was preparing to go to Berkeley to teach for a year. I was putting together a system to take. Since it was almost a release, I made a diff with V6 [a tape containing only the differences between the last release and the one Ken was taking with him]. On the way to Berkeley I stopped by Urbana-Champaign to keep an eye on Greg Chesson. . . . I left the diff tape there and I told him that I wouldn't mind if it got around."135 135 Salus, A Quarter Century of Unix, 138. 380 The need for a magnetic tape to "get around" marks the difference between the 1970s and the present: the distribution of software involved both the material transport of media and the digital copying of information. The desire to distribute bug fixes (the "diff " tape) resonates with the future emergence of Free Software: the [pg 130] fact that others had fixed problems and contributed them back to Thompson and Ritchie produced an obligation to see that the fixes were shared as widely as possible, so that they in turn might be ported to new machines. Bell Labs, on the other hand, would have seen this through the lens of software development, requiring a new release, contract renegotiation, and a new license fee for a new version. Thompson's notion of a "continuum," rather than a series of releases also marks the difference between the idea of an evolving common set of objects stewarded by multiple people in far-flung locales and the idea of a shrink-wrapped "productized" software package that was gaining ascendance as an economic commodity at the same time. When Thompson says "the outside world," he is referring not only to people outside of Bell Labs but to the way the world was seen from within Bell Labs by the lawyers and marketers who would create a new version. For the lawyers, the circulation of source code was a problem because it needed to be stabilized, not so much for commercial reasons as for legal ones—one license for one piece of software. Distributing updates, fixes, and especially new tools and additions written by people who were not employed by Bell Labs scrambled the legal clarity even while it strengthened the technical quality. Lou Katz makes this explicit. 381 A large number of bug fixes was collected, and rather than issue them one at a time, a collection tape ("the 50 fixes") was put together by Ken [the same "diff tape," presumably]. Some of the fixes were quite important, though I don't remember any in particular. I suspect that a significant fraction of the fixes were actually done by non-Bell people. Ken tried to send it out, but the lawyers kept stalling and stalling and stalling. Finally, in complete disgust, someone "found a tape on Mountain Avenue" [the location of Bell Labs] which had the fixes. When the lawyers found out about it, they called every licensee and threatened them with dire consequences if they didn't destroy the tape, after trying to find out how they got the tape. I would guess that no one would actually tell them how they came by the tape (I didn't).136 136 Ibid., emphasis added. 382 Distributing the fixes involved not just a power struggle between the engineers and management, but was in fact clearly motivated by the fact that, as Katz says, "a significant fraction of the fixes were done by non-Bell people." This meant two things: first, that there was an obvious incentive to return the updated system to these [pg 131] people and to others; second, that it was not obvious that AT&T actually owned or could claim rights over these fixes—or, if they did, they needed to cover their legal tracks, which perhaps in part explains the stalling and threatening of the lawyers, who may have been buying time to make a "legal" version, with the proper permissions. 383 The struggle should be seen not as one between the rebel forces of UNIX development and the evil empire of lawyers and managers, but as a struggle between two modes of stabilizing the object known as UNIX. For the lawyers, stability implied finding ways to make UNIX look like a product that would meet the existing legal framework and the peculiar demands of being a regulated monopoly unable to freely compete with other computer manufacturers; the ownership of bits and pieces, ideas and contributions had to be strictly accountable. For the programmers, stability came through redistributing the most up-to-date operating system and sharing all innovations with all users so that new innovations might also be portable. The lawyers saw urgency in making UNIX legally stable; the engineers saw urgency in making UNIX technically stable and compatible with itself, that is, to prevent the forking of UNIX, the death knell for portability. The tension between achieving legal stability of the object and promoting its technical portability and stability is one that has repeated throughout the life of UNIX and its derivatives—and that has ramifications in other areas as well. 384 The identity and boundaries of UNIX were thus intricately formed through its sharing and distribution. Sharing produced its own form of moral and technical order. Troubling questions emerged immediately: were the versions that had been fixed, extended, and expanded still UNIX, and hence still under the control of AT&T? Or were the differences great enough that something else (not-UNIX) was emerging? If a tape full of fixes, contributed by non-Bell employees, was circulated to people who had licensed UNIX, and those fixes changed the system, was it still UNIX? Was it still UNIX in a legal sense or in a technical sense or both? While these questions might seem relatively scholastic, the history of the development of UNIX suggests something far more interesting: just about every possible modification has been made, legally and technically, but the concept of UNIX has remained remarkably stable. 385 Porting UNIX 386 Technical portability accounts for only part of UNIX's success. As a pedagogical resource, UNIX quickly became an indispensable tool for academics around the world. As it was installed and improved, it was taught and learned. The fact that UNIX spread first to university computer-science departments, and not to businesses, government, or nongovernmental organizations, meant that it also became part of the core pedagogical practice of a generation of programmers and computer scientists; over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, UNIX came to exemplify the very concept of an operating system, especially time-shared, multi-user operating systems. Two stories describe the porting of UNIX from machines to minds and illustrate the practice as it developed and how it intersected with the technical and legal attempts to stabilize UNIX as an object: the story of John Lions's Commentary on Unix 6th Edition and the story of Andrew Tanenbaum's Minix. 387 The development of a pedagogical UNIX lent a new stability to the concept of UNIX as opposed to its stability as a body of source code or as a legal entity. The porting of UNIX was so successful that even in cases where a ported version of UNIX shares none of the same source code as the original, it is still considered UNIX. The monstrous and promiscuous nature of UNIX is most clear in the stories of Lions and Tanenbaum, especially when contrasted with the commercial, legal, and technical integrity of something like Microsoft Windows, which generally exists in only a small number of forms (NT, ME, XP, 95, 98, etc.), possessing carefully controlled source code, immured in legal protection, and distributed only through sales and service packs to customers or personal-computer manufacturers. While Windows is much more widely used than UNIX, it is far from having become a paradigmatic pedagogical object; its integrity is predominantly legal, not technical or pedagogical. Or, in pedagogical terms, Windows is to fish as UNIX is to fishing lessons. 388 Lions's Commentary is also known as "the most photocopied document in computer science." Lions was a researcher and senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales in the early 1970s; after reading the first paper by Ritchie and Thompson on UNIX, he convinced his colleagues to purchase a license from AT&T.137 Lions, like many researchers, was impressed by the quality of the system, and he was, like all of the UNIX users of that period, intimately [pg 133] familiar with the UNIX source code—a necessity in order to install, run, or repair it. Lions began using the system to teach his classes on operating systems, and in the course of doing so he produced a textbook of sorts, which consisted of the entire source code of UNIX version 6 (V6), along with elaborate, line-by-line commentary and explanation. The value of this textbook can hardly be underestimated. Access to machines and software that could be used to understand how a real system worked was very limited: "Real computers with real operating systems were locked up in machine rooms and committed to processing twenty four hours a day. UNIX changed that."138 Berny Goodheart, in an appreciation of Lions's Commentary, reiterated this sense of the practical usefulness of the source code and commentary: "It is important to understand the significance of John's work at that time: for students studying computer science in the 1970s, complex issues such as process scheduling, security, synchronization, file systems and other concepts were beyond normal comprehension and were extremely difficult to teach—there simply wasn't anything available with enough accessibility for students to use as a case study. Instead a student's discipline in computer science was earned by punching holes in cards, collecting fan-fold paper printouts, and so on. Basically, a computer operating system in that era was considered to be a huge chunk of inaccessible proprietary code."139 137 Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, "The Unix Operating System," Bell Systems Technical Journal (1974). 138 Greg Rose, quoted in Lions, Commentary, n.p. 139 Lions, Commentary, n.p. 389 Lions's commentary was a unique document in the world of computer science, containing a kind of key to learning about a central component of the computer, one that very few people would have had access to in the 1970s. It shows how UNIX was ported not only to machines (which were scarce) but also to the minds of young researchers and student programmers (which were plentiful). Several generations of both academic computer scientists and students who went on to work for computer or software corporations were trained on photocopies of UNIX source code, with a whiff of toner and illicit circulation: a distributed operating system in the textual sense. 390 Unfortunately, Commentary was also legally restricted in its distribution. AT&T and Western Electric, in hopes that they could maintain trade-secret status for UNIX, allowed only very limited circulation of the book. At first, Lions was given permission to distribute single copies only to people who already possessed a license for UNIX V6; later Bell Labs itself would distribute Commentary [pg 134] briefly, but only to licensed users, and not for sale, distribution, or copying. Nonetheless, nearly everyone seems to have possessed a dog-eared, nth-generation copy. Peter Reintjes writes, "We soon came into possession of what looked like a fifth generation photocopy and someone who shall remain nameless spent all night in the copier room spawning a sixth, an act expressly forbidden by a carefully worded disclaimer on the first page. Four remarkable things were happening at the same time. One, we had discovered the first piece of software that would inspire rather than annoy us; two, we had acquired what amounted to a literary criticism of that computer software; three, we were making the single most significant advancement of our education in computer science by actually reading an entire operating system; and four, we were breaking the law."140 140 Ibid. 391 Thus, these generations of computer-science students and academics shared a secret—a trade secret become open secret. Every student who learned the essentials of the UNIX operating system from a photocopy of Lions's commentary, also learned about AT&T's attempt to control its legal distribution on the front cover of their textbook. The parallel development of photocopying has a nice resonance here; together with home cassette taping of music and the introduction of the video-cassette recorder, photocopying helped drive the changes to copyright law adopted in 1976. 392 Thirty years later, and long after the source code in it had been completely replaced, Lions's Commentary is still widely admired by geeks. Even though Free Software has come full circle in providing students with an actual operating system that can be legally studied, taught, copied, and implemented, the kind of "literary criticism" that Lions's work represents is still extremely rare; even reading obsolete code with clear commentary is one of the few ways to truly understand the design elements and clever implementations that made the UNIX operating system so different from its predecessors and even many of its successors, few, if any of which have been so successfully ported to the minds of so many students. 393 Lions's Commentary contributed to the creation of a worldwide community of people whose connection to each other was formed by a body of source code, both in its implemented form and in its textual, photocopied form. This nascent recursive public not only understood itself as belonging to a technical elite which was constituted by its creation, understanding, and promotion of a particular [pg 135] technical tool, but also recognized itself as "breaking the law," a community constituted in opposition to forms of power that governed the circulation, distribution, modification, and creation of the very tools they were learning to make as part of their vocation. The material connection shared around the world by UNIX-loving geeks to their source code is not a mere technical experience, but a social and legal one as well. 394 Lions was not the only researcher to recognize that teaching the source code was the swiftest route to comprehension. The other story of the circulation of source code concerns Andrew Tanenbaum, a well-respected computer scientist and an author of standard textbooks on computer architecture, operating systems, and networking.141 In the 1970s Tanenbaum had also used UNIX as a teaching tool in classes at the Vrije Universiteit, in Amsterdam. Because the source code was distributed with the binary code, he could have his students explore directly the implementations of the system, and he often used the source code and the Lions book in his classes. But, according to his Operating Systems: Design and Implementation (1987), "When AT&T released Version 7 [ca. 1979], it began to realize that UNIX was a valuable commercial product, so it issued Version 7 with a license that prohibited the source code from being studied in courses, in order to avoid endangering its status as a trade secret. Many universities complied by simply dropping the study of UNIX, and teaching only theory" (13). For Tanenbaum, this was an unacceptable alternative—but so, apparently, was continuing to break the law by teaching UNIX in his courses. And so he proceeded to create a completely new UNIX-like operating system that used not a single line of AT&T source code. He called his creation Minix. It was a stripped-down version intended to run on personal computers (IBM PCs), and to be distributed along with the textbook Operating Systems, published by Prentice Hall.142 141 Tanenbaum's two most famous textbooks are Operating Systems and Computer Networks, which have seen three and four editions respectively. 142 Tanenbaum was not the only person to follow this route. The other acknowledged giant in the computer-science textbook world, Douglas Comer, created Xinu and Xinu-PC (UNIX spelled backwards) in Operating Systems Design in 1984. 395 Minix became as widely used in the 1980s as a teaching tool as Lions's source code had been in the 1970s. According to Tanenbaum, the Usenet group comp.os.minix had reached 40,000 members by the late 1980s, and he was receiving constant suggestions for changes and improvements to the operating system. His own commitment to teaching meant that he incorporated few of these suggestions, an effort to keep the system simple enough to be printed in a textbook and understood by undergraduates. Minix [pg 136] was freely available as source code, and it was a fully functioning operating system, even a potential alternative to UNIX that would run on a personal computer. Here was a clear example of the conceptual integrity of UNIX being communicated to another generation of computer-science students: Tanenbaum's textbook is not called "UNIX Operating Systems"—it is called Operating Systems. The clear implication is that UNIX represented the clearest example of the principles that should guide the creation of any operating system: it was, for all intents and purposes, state of the art even twenty years after it was first conceived. 396 Minix was not commercial software, but nor was it Free Software. It was copyrighted and controlled by Tanenbaum's publisher, Prentice Hall. Because it used no AT&T source code, Minix was also legally independent, a legal object of its own. The fact that it was intended to be legally distinct from, yet conceptually true to UNIX is a clear indication of the kinds of tensions that govern the creation and sharing of source code. The ironic apotheosis of Minix as the pedagogical gold standard for studying UNIX came in 1991-92, when a young Linus Torvalds created a "fork" of Minix, also rewritten from scratch, that would go on to become the paradigmatic piece of Free Software: Linux. Tanenbaum's purpose for Minix was that it remain a pedagogically useful operating system—small, concise, and illustrative—whereas Torvalds wanted to extend and expand his version of Minix to take full advantage of the kinds of hardware being produced in the 1990s. Both, however, were committed to source-code visibility and sharing as the swiftest route to complete comprehension of operating-systems principles. 397 Forking UNIX 398 Tanenbaum's need to produce Minix was driven by a desire to share the source code of UNIX with students, a desire AT&T was manifestly uncomfortable with and which threatened the trade-secret status of their property. The fact that Minix might be called a fork of UNIX is a key aspect of the political economy of operating systems and social systems. Forking generally refers to the creation of new, modified source code from an original base of source code, resulting in two distinct programs with the same parent. Whereas the modification of an engine results only in a modified engine, the [pg 137] modification of source code implies differentiation and reproduction, because of the ease with which it can be copied. 399 How could Minix—a complete rewrite—still be considered the same object? Considered solely from the perspective of trade-secret law, the two objects were distinct, though from the perspective of copyright there was perhaps a case for infringement, although AT&T did not rely on copyright as much as on trade secret. From a technical perspective, the functions and processes that the software accomplishes are the same, but the means by which they are coded to do so are different. And from a pedagogical standpoint, the two are identical—they exemplify certain core features of an operating system (file-system structure, memory paging, process management)—all the rest is optimization, or bells and whistles. Understanding the nature of forking requires also that UNIX be understood from a social perspective, that is, from the perspective of an operating system created and modified by user-developers around the world according to particular and partial demands. It forms the basis for the emergence of a robust recursive public. 400 One of the more important instances of the forking of UNIX's perambulatory source code and the developing community of UNIX co-developers is the story of the Berkeley Software Distribution and its incorporation of the TCP/IP protocols. In 1975 Ken Thompson took a sabbatical in his hometown of Berkeley, California, where he helped members of the computer-science department with their installations of UNIX, arriving with V6 and the "50 bug fixes" diff tape. Ken had begun work on a compiler for the Pascal programming language that would run on UNIX, and this work was taken up by two young graduate students: Bill Joy and Chuck Hartley. (Joy would later co-found Sun Microsystems, one of the most successful UNIX-based workstation companies in the history of the industry.) 401 Joy, above nearly all others, enthusiastically participated in the informal distribution of source code. With a popular and well-built Pascal system, and a new text editor called ex (later vi), he created the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a set of tools that could be used in combination with the UNIX operating system. They were extensions to the original UNIX operating system, but not a complete, rewritten version that might replace it. By all accounts, Joy served as a kind of one-man software-distribution house, making tapes and posting them, taking orders and cashing checks—all in [pg 138] addition to creating software.143 UNIX users around the world soon learned of this valuable set of extensions to the system, and before long, many were differentiating between AT&T UNIX and BSD UNIX. 143 McKusick, "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix," 32. 402 According to Don Libes, Bell Labs allowed Berkeley to distribute its extensions to UNIX so long as the recipients also had a license from Bell Labs for the original UNIX (an arrangement similar to the one that governed Lions's Commentary).144 From about 1976 until about 1981, BSD slowly became an independent distribution—indeed, a complete version of UNIX—well-known for the vi editor and the Pascal compiler, but also for the addition of virtual memory and its implementation on DEC's VAX machines.145 It should be clear that the unusual quasi-commercial status of AT&T's UNIX allowed for this situation in a way that a fully commercial computer corporation would never have allowed. Consider, for instance, the fact that many UNIX users—students at a university, for instance—could not essentially know whether they were using an AT&T product or something called BSD UNIX created at Berkeley. The operating system functioned in the same way and, except for the presence of copyright notices that occasionally flashed on the screen, did not make any show of asserting its brand identity (that would come later, in the 1980s). Whereas a commercial computer manufacturer would have allowed something like BSD only if it were incorporated into and distributed as a single, marketable, and identifiable product with a clever name, AT&T turned something of a blind eye to the proliferation and spread of AT&T UNIX and the result were forks in the project: distinct bodies of source code, each an instance of something called UNIX. 144 Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 16-17. 145 A recent court case between the Utah-based SCO—the current owner of the legal rights to the original UNIX source code—and IBM raised yet again the question of how much of the original UNIX source code exists in the BSD distribution. SCO alleges that IBM (and Linus Torvalds) inserted SCO-owned UNIX source code into the Linux kernel. However, the incredibly circuitous route of the "original" source code makes these claims hard to ferret out: it was developed at Bell Labs, licensed to multiple universities, used as a basis for BSD, sold to an earlier version of the company SCO (then known as the Santa Cruz Operation), which created a version called Xenix in cooperation with Microsoft. See the diagram by Eric Lévénez at <http://www.levenez.com/unix/>. For more detail on this case, see www.groklaw.com. 403 As BSD developed, it gained different kinds of functionality than the UNIX from which it was spawned. The most significant development was the inclusion of code that allowed it to connect computers to the Arpanet, using the TCP/IP protocols designed by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn. The TCP/IP protocols were a key feature of the Arpanet, overseen by the Information Processing and Techniques Office (IPTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) from its inception in 1967 until about 1977. The goal of the protocols was to allow different networks, each with its own machines and administrative boundaries, to be connected to each other.146 Although there is a common heritage—in the form of J. C. R. Licklider—which ties the imagination of the time-sharing operating [pg 139] system to the creation of the "galactic network," the Arpanet initially developed completely independent of UNIX.147 As a time-sharing operating system, UNIX was meant to allow the sharing of resources on a single computer, whether mainframe or minicomputer, but it was not initially intended to be connected to a network of other computers running UNIX, as is the case today.148 The goal of Arpanet, by contrast, was explicitly to achieve the sharing of resources located on diverse machines across diverse networks. 146 See Vinton G. Cerf and Robert Kahn, "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection." For the history, see Abbate, Inventing the Internet; Norberg and O'Neill, A History of the Information Techniques Processing Office. Also see chapters 1 and 5 herein for more detail on the role of these protocols and the RFC process. 147 Waldrop, The Dream Machine, chaps. 5 and 6. 148 The exception being a not unimportant tool called Unix to Unix Copy Protocol, or uucp, which was widely used to transmit data by phone and formed the bases for the creation of the Usenet. See Hauben and Hauben, Netizens. 404 To achieve the benefits of TCP/IP, the resources needed to be implemented in all of the different operating systems that were connected to the Arpanet—whatever operating system and machine happened to be in use at each of the nodes. However, by 1977, the original machines used on the network were outdated and increasingly difficult to maintain and, according to Kirk McKusick, the greatest expense was that of porting the old protocol software to new machines. Hence, IPTO decided to pursue in part a strategy of achieving coordination at the operating-system level, and they chose UNIX as one of the core platforms on which to standardize. In short, they had seen the light of portability. In about 1978 IPTO granted a contract to Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN), one of the original Arpanet contractors, to integrate the TCP/IP protocols into the UNIX operating system. 405 But then something odd happened, according to Salus: "An initial prototype was done by BBN and given to Berkeley. Bill [Joy] immediately started hacking on it because it would only run an Ethernet at about 56K/sec utilizing 100% of the CPU on a 750. . . . Bill lobotomized the code and increased its performance to on the order of 700KB/sec. This caused some consternation with BBN when they came in with their ‘ finished' version, and Bill wouldn't accept it. There were battles for years after, about which version would be in the system. The Berkeley version ultimately won."149 149 Salus, A Quarter Century of UNIX, 161. 406 Although it is not clear, it appears BBN intended to give Joy the code in order to include it in his BSD version of UNIX for distribution, and that Joy and collaborators intended to cooperate with Rob Gurwitz of BBN on a final implementation, but Berkeley insisted on "improving" the code to make it perform more to their needs, and BBN apparently dissented from this.150 One result of this scuffle between BSD and BBN was a genuine fork: two bodies of code that did the same thing, competing with each other to become the standard UNIX implementation of TCP/IP. Here, then, was a [pg 140] case of sharing source code that led to the creation of different versions of software—sharing without collaboration. Some sites used the BBN code, some used the Berkeley code. 150 TCP/IP Digest 1.6 (11 November 1981) contains Joy's explanation of Berkeley's intentions (Message-ID: anews.aucbvax.5236 ). 407 Forking, however, does not imply permanent divergence, and the continual improvement, porting, and sharing of software can have odd consequences when forks occur. On the one hand, there are particular pieces of source code: they must be identifiable and exact, and prepended with a copyright notice, as was the case of the Berkeley code, which was famously and vigorously policed by the University of California regents, who allowed for a very liberal distribution of BSD code on the condition that the copyright notice was retained. On the other hand, there are particular named collections of code that work together (e.g., UNIX™, or DARPA-approved UNIX, or later, Certified Open Source [sm]) and are often identified by a trademark symbol intended, legally speaking, to differentiate products, not to assert ownership of particular instances of a product. 408 The odd consequence is this: Bill Joy's specific TCP/IP code was incorporated not only into BSD UNIX, but also into other versions of UNIX, including the UNIX distributed by AT&T (which had originally licensed UNIX to Berkeley) with the Berkeley copyright notice removed. This bizarre, tangled bank of licenses and code resulted in a famous suit and countersuit between AT&T and Berkeley, in which the intricacies of this situation were sorted out.151 An innocent bystander, expecting UNIX to be a single thing, might be surprised to find that it takes different forms for reasons that are all but impossible to identify, but the cause of which is clear: different versions of sharing in conflict with one another; different moral and technical imaginations of order that result in complex entanglements of value and code. 151 See Andrew Leonard, "BSD Unix: Power to the People, from the Code," Salon, 16 May 2000, <http://archive.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/>. 409 The BSD fork of UNIX (and the subfork of TCP/IP) was only one of many to come. By the early 1980s, a proliferation of UNIX forks had emerged and would be followed shortly by a very robust commercialization. At the same time, the circulation of source code started to slow, as corporations began to compete by adding features and creating hardware specifically designed to run UNIX (such as the Sun Sparc workstation and the Solaris operating system, the result of Joy's commercialization of BSD in the 1980s). The question of how to make all of these versions work together eventually became the subject of the open-systems discussions that would dominate the workstation and networking sectors of the computer [pg 141] market from the early 1980s to 1993, when the dual success of Windows NT and the arrival of the Internet into public consciousness changed the fortunes of the UNIX industry. 410 A second, and more important, effect of the struggle between BBN and BSD was simply the widespread adoption of the TCP/IP protocols. An estimated 98 percent of computer-science departments in the United States and many such departments around the world incorporated the TCP/IP protocols into their UNIX systems and gained instant access to Arpanet.152 The fact that this occurred when it did is important: a few years later, during the era of the commercialization of UNIX, these protocols might very well not have been widely implemented (or more likely implemented in incompatible, nonstandard forms) by manufacturers, whereas before 1983, university computer scientists saw every benefit in doing so if it meant they could easily connect to the largest single computer network on the planet. The large, already functioning, relatively standard implementation of TCP/IP on UNIX (and the ability to look at the source code) gave these protocols a tremendous advantage in terms of their survival and success as the basis of a global and singular network. 152 Norberg and O'Neill, A History of the Information Techniques Processing Office, 184-85. They cite Comer, Internetworking with TCP/IP, 6 for the figure. 411 Conclusion 412 The UNIX operating system is not just a technical achievement; it is the creation of a set of norms for sharing source code in an unusual environment: quasi-commercial, quasi-academic, networked, and planetwide. Sharing UNIX source code has taken three basic forms: porting source code (transferring it from one machine to another); teaching source code, or "porting" it to students in a pedagogical setting where the use of an actual working operating system vastly facilitates the teaching of theory and concepts; and forking source code (modifying the existing source code to do something new or different). This play of proliferation and differentiation is essential to the remarkably stable identity of UNIX, but that identity exists in multiple forms: technical (as a functioning, self-compatible operating system), legal (as a license-circumscribed version subject to intellectual property and commercial law), and pedagogical (as a conceptual exemplar, the paradigm of an operating system). Source code shared in this manner is essentially unlike any other kind of [pg 142] source code in the world of computers, whether academic or commercial. It raises troubling questions about standardization, about control and audit, and about legitimacy that haunts not only UNIX but the Internet and its various "open" protocols as well. 413 Sharing source code in Free Software looks the way it does today because of UNIX. But UNIX looks the way it does not because of the inventive genius of Thompson and Ritchie, or the marketing and management brilliance of AT&T, but because sharing produces its own kind of order: operating systems and social systems. The fact that geeks are wont to speak of "the UNIX philosophy" means that UNIX is not just an operating system but a way of organizing the complex relations of life and work through technical means; a way of charting and breaching the boundaries between the academic, the aesthetic, and the commercial; a way of implementing ideas of a moral and technical order. What's more, as source code comes to include more and more of the activities of everyday communication and creation—as it comes to replace writing and supplement thinking—the genealogy of its portability and the history of its forking will illuminate the kinds of order emerging in practices and technologies far removed from operating systems—but tied intimately to the UNIX philosophy. 414 5. Conceiving Open Systems 415 The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.153 153 Quoted in Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 67, and also in Critchley and Batty, Open Systems, 17. I first heard it in an interview with Sean Doyle in 1998. 416 Openness is an unruly concept. While free tends toward ambiguity (free as in speech, or free as in beer?), open tends toward obfuscation. Everyone claims to be open, everyone has something to share, everyone agrees that being open is the obvious thing to do—after all, openness is the other half of "open source"—but for all its obviousness, being "open" is perhaps the most complex component of Free Software. It is never quite clear whether being open is a means or an end. Worse, the opposite of open in this case (specifically, "open systems") is not closed, but "proprietary"—signaling the complicated imbrication of the technical, the legal, and the commercial. 417 In this chapter I tell the story of the contest over the meaning of "open systems" from 1980 to 1993, a contest to create a simultaneously moral and technical infrastructure within the computer [pg 144] industry.154 The infrastructure in question includes technical components—the UNIX operating system and the TCP/IP protocols of the Internet as open systems—but it also includes "moral" components, including the demand for structures of fair and open competition, antimonopoly and open markets, and open-standards processes for high-tech networked computers and software in the 1980s.155 By moral, I mean imaginations of the proper order of collective political and commercial action; referring to much more than simply how individuals should act, moral signifies a vision of how economy and society should be ordered collectively. 154 Moral in this usage signals the "moral and social order" I explored through the concept of social imaginaries in chapter 1. Or, in the Scottish Enlightenment sense of Adam Smith, it points to the right organization and relations of exchange among humans. 155 There is, of course, a relatively robust discourse of open systems in biology, sociology, systems theory, and cybernetics; however, that meaning of open systems is more or less completely distinct from what openness and open systems came to mean in the computer industry in the period book-ended by the arrivals of the personal computer and the explosion of the Internet (ca. 1980-93). One relevant overlap between these two meanings can be found in the work of Carl Hewitt at the MIT Media Lab and in the interest in "agorics" taken by K. Eric Drexler, Bernardo Huberman, and Mark S. Miller. See Huberman, The Ecology of Computation. 418 The open-systems story is also a story of the blind spot of open systems—in that blind spot is intellectual property. The story reveals a tension between incompatible moral-technical orders: on the one hand, the promise of multiple manufacturers and corporations creating interoperable components and selling them in an open, heterogeneous market; on the other, an intellectual-property system that encouraged jealous guarding and secrecy, and granted monopoly status to source code, designs, and ideas in order to differentiate products and promote competition. The tension proved irresolvable: without shared source code, for instance, interoperable operating systems are impossible. Without interoperable operating systems, internetworking and portable applications are impossible. Without portable applications that can run on any system, open markets are impossible. Without open markets, monopoly power reigns. 419 Standardization was at the heart of the contest, but by whom and by what means was never resolved. The dream of open systems, pursued in an entirely unregulated industry, resulted in a complicated experiment in novel forms of standardization and cooperation. The creation of a "standard" operating system based on UNIX is the story of a failure, a kind of "figuring out" gone haywire, which resulted in huge consortia of computer manufacturers attempting to work together and compete with each other at the same time. Meanwhile, the successful creation of a "standard" networking protocol—known as the Open Systems Interconnection Reference Model (OSI)—is a story of failure that hides a larger success; OSI was eclipsed in the same period by the rapid and ad hoc adoption of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), which used a radically different standardization process and which succeeded for a number of surprising reasons, allowing the Internet [pg 145] to take the form it did in the 1990s and ultimately exemplifying the moral-technical imaginary of a recursive public—and one at the heart of the practices of Free Software. 420 The conceiving of openness, which is the central plot of these two stories, has become an essential component of the contemporary practice and power of Free Software. These early battles created a kind of widespread readiness for Free Software in the 1990s, a recognition of Free Software as a removal of open systems' blind spot, as much as an exploitation of its power. The geek ideal of openness and a moral-technical order (the one that made Napster so significant an event) was forged in the era of open systems; without this concrete historical conception of how to maintain openness in technical and moral terms, the recursive public of geeks would be just another hierarchical closed organization—a corporation manqué—and not an independent public serving as a check on the kinds of destructive power that dominated the open-systems contest. 421 Hopelessly Plural 422 Big iron, silos, legacy systems, turnkey systems, dinosaurs, mainframes: with the benefit of hindsight, the computer industry of the 1960s to the 1980s appears to be backward and closed, to have literally painted itself into a corner, as an early Intel advertisement suggests (figure 3). Contemporary observers who show disgust and impatience with the form that computers took in this era are without fail supporters of open systems and opponents of proprietary systems that "lock in" customers to specific vendors and create artificial demands for support, integration, and management of resources. Open systems (were it allowed to flourish) would solve all these problems. 423 Given the promise of a "general-purpose computer," it should seem ironic at best that open systems needed to be created. But the general-purpose computer never came into being. We do not live in the world of The Computer, but in a world of computers: myriad, incompatible, specific machines. The design of specialized machines (or "architectures") was, and still is, key to a competitive industry in computers. It required CPUs and components and associated software that could be clearly qualified and marketed [pg 146] [pg 147] as distinct products: the DEC PDP-11 or the IBM 360 or the CDC 6600. On the Fordist model of automobile production, the computer industry's mission was to render desired functions (scientific calculation, bookkeeping, reservations management) in a large box with a button on it (or a very large number of buttons on increasingly smaller boxes). Despite the theoretical possibility, such computers were not designed to do anything, but, rather, to do specific kinds of calculations exceedingly well. They were objects customized to particular markets. 424 [2bits_05_03-100.png] *3 *3 Open systems is the solution to painting yourself into a corner. Intel advertisement, Wall Street Journal, 30 May 1984. 425 The marketing strategy was therefore extremely stable from about 1955 to about 1980: identify customers with computing needs, build a computer to serve them, provide them with all of the equipment, software, support, or peripherals they need to do the job—and charge a large amount. Organizationally speaking, it was an industry dominated by "IBM and the seven dwarfs": Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, Control Data, General Electric, NCR, RCA, Univac, and Burroughs, with a few upstarts like DEC in the wings. 426 By the 1980s, however, a certain inversion had happened. Computers had become smaller and faster; there were more and more of them, and it was becoming increasingly clear to the "big iron" manufacturers that what was most valuable to users was the information they generated, not the machines that did the generating. Such a realization, so the story goes, leads to a demand for interchangeability, interoperability, information sharing, and networking. It also presents the nightmarish problems of conversion between a bewildering, heterogeneous, and rapidly growing array of hardware, software, protocols, and systems. As one conference paper on the subject of evaluating open systems put it, "At some point a large enterprise will look around and see a huge amount of equipment and software that will not work together. Most importantly, the information stored on these diverse platforms is not being shared, leading to unnecessary duplication and lost profit."156 156 Keves, "Open Systems Formal Evaluation Process," 87. 427 Open systems emerged in the 1980s as the name of the solution to this problem: an approach to the design of systems that, if all participants were to adopt it, would lead to widely interoperable, integrated machines that could send, store, process, and receive the user's information. In marketing and public-relations terms, it would provide "seamless integration." 428 In theory, open systems was simply a question of standards adoption. For instance, if all the manufacturers of UNIX systems could [pg 148] be convinced to adopt the same basic standard for the operating system, then seamless integration would naturally follow as all the various applications could be written once to run on any variant UNIX system, regardless of which company made it. In reality, such a standard was far from obvious, difficult to create, and even more difficult to enforce. As such, the meaning of open systems was "hopelessly plural," and the term came to mean an incredibly diverse array of things. 429 "Openness" is precisely the kind of concept that wavers between end and means. Is openness good in itself, or is openness a means to achieve something else—and if so what? Who wants to achieve openness, and for what purpose? Is openness a goal? Or is it a means by which a different goal—say, "interoperability" or "integration"—is achieved? Whose goals are these, and who sets them? Are the goals of corporations different from or at odds with the goals of university researchers or government officials? Are there large central visions to which the activities of all are ultimately subordinate? 430 Between 1980 and 1993, no person or company or computer industry consortium explicitly set openness as the goal that organizations, corporations, or programmers should aim at, but, by the same token, hardly anyone dissented from the demand for openness. As such, it appears clearly as a kind of cultural imperative, reflecting a longstanding social imaginary with roots in liberal democratic notions, versions of a free market and ideals of the free exchange of knowledge, but confronting changed technical conditions that bring the moral ideas of order into relief, and into question. 431 In the 1980s everyone seemed to want some kind of openness, whether among manufacturers or customers, from General Motors to the armed forces.157 The debates, both rhetorical and technical, about the meaning of open systems have produced a slough of writings, largely directed at corporate IT managers and CIOs. For instance, Terry A. Critchley and K. C. Batty, the authors of Open Systems: The Reality (1993), claim to have collected over a hundred definitions of open systems. The definitions stress different aspects—from interoperability of heterogeneous machines, to compatibility of different applications, to portability of operating systems, to legitimate standards with open-interface definitions—including those that privilege ideologies of a free market, as does Bill Gates's definition: "There's nothing more open than the PC market. . . . [U]sers can choose the latest and greatest software." The range [pg 149] of meanings was huge and oriented along multiple axes: what, to whom, how, and so on. Open systems could mean that source code was open to view or that only the specifications or interfaces were; it could mean "available to certain third parties" or "available to everyone, including competitors"; it could mean self-publishing, well-defined interfaces and application programming interfaces (APIs), or it could mean sticking to standards set by governments and professional societies. To cynics, it simply meant that the marketing department liked the word open and used it a lot. 157 General Motors stirred strong interest in open systems by creating, in 1985, its Manufacturing Automation Protocol (MAP), which was built on UNIX. At the time, General Motors was the second-largest purchaser of computer equipment after the government. The Department of Defense and the U.S. Air Force also adopted and required POSIX-compliant UNIX systems early on. 432 One part of the definition, however, was both consistent and extremely important: the opposite of an "open system" was not a "closed system" but a "proprietary system." In industries other than networking and computing the word proprietary will most likely have a positive valence, as in "our exclusive proprietary technology." But in the context of computers and networks such a usage became anathema in the 1980s and 1990s; what customers reportedly wanted was a system that worked nicely with other systems, and that system had to be by definition open since no single company could provide all of the possible needs of a modern business or government agency. And even if it could, it shouldn't be allowed to. For instance, "In the beginning was the word and the word was ‘ proprietary.' IBM showed the way, purveying machines that existed in splendid isolation. They could not be operated using programs written for any other computer; they could not communicate with the machines of competitors. If your company started out buying computers of various sizes from the International Business Machines Corporation because it was the biggest and best, you soon found yourself locked as securely to Big Blue as a manacled wretch in a medieval dungeon. When an IBM rival unveiled a technologically advanced product, you could only sigh; it might be years before the new technology showed up in the IBM line."158 158 Paul Fusco, "The Gospel According to Joy," New York Times, 27 March 1988, Sunday Magazine, 28. 433 With the exception of IBM (and to some extent its closest competitors: Hewlett-Packard, Burroughs, and Unisys), computer corporations in the 1980s sought to distance themselves from such "medieval" proprietary solutions (such talk also echoes that of usable pasts of the Protestant Reformation often used by geeks). New firms like Sun and Apollo deliberately berated the IBM model. Bill Joy reportedly called one of IBM's new releases in the 1980s a "grazing dinosaur ‘ with a truck outside pumping its bodily fluids through it.'"159 159 "Dinosaur" entry, The Jargon File, <http://catb.org/jargon/html/D/dinosaur.html>. 434 Open systems was never a simple solution though: all that complexity in hardware, software, components, and peripherals could only be solved by pushing hard for standards—even for a single standard. Or, to put it differently, during the 1980s, everyone agreed that open systems was a great idea, but no one agreed on which open systems. As one of the anonymous speakers in Open Systems: The Reality puts it, "It took me a long time to understand what (the industry) meant by open vs. proprietary, but I finally figured it out. From the perspective of any one supplier, open meant ‘ our products.' Proprietary meant ‘ everyone else's products.'"160 160 Crichtley and Batty, Open Systems, 10. 435 For most supporters of open systems, the opposition between open and proprietary had a certain moral force: it indicated that corporations providing the latter were dangerously close to being evil, immoral, perhaps even criminal monopolists. Adrian Gropper and Sean Doyle, the principals in Amicas, an Internet teleradiology company, for instance, routinely referred to the large proprietary healthcare-information systems they confronted in these terms: open systems are the way of light, not dark. Although there are no doubt arguments for closed systems—security, privacy, robustness, control—the demand for interoperability does not mean that such closure will be sacrificed.161 Closure was also a choice. That is, open systems was an issue of sovereignty, involving the right, in a moral sense, of a customer to control a technical order hemmed in by firm standards that allowed customers to combine a number of different pieces of hardware and software purchased in an open market and to control the configuration themselves—not enforced openness, but the right to decide oneself on whether and how to be open or closed. 161 An excellent counterpoint here is Paul Edwards's The Closed World, which clearly demonstrates the appeal of a thoroughly and hierarchically controlled system such as the Semi-Automated Ground Environment (SAGE) of the Department of Defense against the emergence of more "green world" models of openness. 436 The open-systems idea of moral order conflicts, however, with an idea of moral order represented by intellectual property: the right, encoded in law, to assert ownership over and control particular bits of source code, software, and hardware. The call for and the market in open systems were never imagined as being opposed to intellectual property as such, even if the opposition between open and proprietary seemed to indicate a kind of subterranean recognition of the role of intellectual property. The issue was never explicitly broached. Of the hundred definitions in Open Systems, only one definition comes close to including legal issues: "Speaker at Interop '90 (paraphrased and maybe apocryphal): ‘ If you ask to gain access to a technology and the response you get back is a price list, then [pg 151] that technology is "open." If what you get back is a letter from a lawyer, then it's not "open."'"162 162 Crichtley and Batty, Open Systems, 13. 437 Openness here is not equated with freedom to copy and modify, but with the freedom to buy access to any aspect of a system without signing a contract, a nondisclosure agreement, or any other legal document besides a check. The ground rules of competition are unchallenged: the existing system of intellectual property—a system that was expanded and strengthened in this period—was a sine qua non of competition. 438 Openness understood in this manner means an open market in which it is possible to buy standardized things which are neither obscure nor secret, but can be examined and judged—a "commodity" market, where products have functions, where quality is comparable and forms the basis for vigorous competition. What this notion implies is freedom from monopoly control by corporations over products, a freedom that is nearly impossible to maintain when the entire industry is structured around the monopoly control of intellectual property through trade secret, patent, or copyright. The blind spot hides the contradiction between an industry imagined on the model of manufacturing distinct and tangible products, and the reality of an industry that wavers somewhere between service and product, dealing in intangible intellectual property whose boundaries and identity are in fact defined by how they are exchanged, circulated, and shared, as in the case of the proliferation and differentiation of the UNIX operating system. 439 There was no disagreement about the necessity of intellectual property in the computer industry of the 1980s, and there was no perceived contradiction in the demands for openness. Indeed, openness could only make sense if it were built on top of a stable system of intellectual property that allowed competitors to maintain clear definitions of the boundaries of their products. But the creation of interoperable components seemed to demand a relaxation of the secrecy and guardedness necessary to "protect" intellectual property. Indeed, for some observers, the problem of openness created the opportunity for the worst kinds of cynical logic, as in this example from Regis McKenna's Who's Afraid of Big Blue? 440 Users want open environments, so the vendors had better comply. In fact, it is a good idea to support new standards early. That way, you can help control the development of standards. Moreover, you can [pg 152] take credit for driving the standard. Supporting standards is a way to demonstrate that you're on the side of users. On the other hand, companies cannot compete on the basis of standards alone. Companies that live by standards can die by standards. Other companies, adhering to the same standards, could win on the basis of superior manufacturing technology. If companies do nothing but adhere to standards, then all computers will become commodities, and nobody will be able to make any money. Thus, companies must keep something proprietary, something to differentiate their products.163 163 McKenna, Who's Afraid of Big Blue? 178, emphasis added. McKenna goes on to suggest that computer companies can differentiate themselves by adding services, better interfaces, or higher reliability—ironically similar to arguments that the Open Source Initiative would make ten years later. 441 By such an account, open systems would be tantamount to economic regression, a state of pure competition on the basis of manufacturing superiority, and not on the basis of the competitive advantage granted by the monopoly of intellectual property, the clear hallmark of a high-tech industry.164 It was an irresolvable tension between the desire for a cooperative, market-based infrastructure and the structure of an intellectual-property system ill-suited to the technical realities within which companies and customers operated—a tension revealing the reorientation of knowledge and power with respect to creation, dissemination, and modification of knowledge. 164 Richard Stallman, echoing the image of medieval manacled wretches, characterized the blind spot thus: "Unix does not give the user any more legal freedom than Windows does. What they mean by ‘ open systems' is that you can mix and match components, so you can decide to have, say, a Sun chain on your right leg and some other company's chain on your left leg, and maybe some third company's chain on your right arm, and this is supposed to be better than having to choose to have Sun chains on all your limbs, or Microsoft chains on all your limbs. You know, I don't care whose chains are on each limb. What I want is not to be chained by anyone" ("Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-certified Genius," interview by Michael Gross, Cambridge, Mass., 1999, 5, <http://www.mgross.com/MoreThgsChng/interviews/stallman1.html)>. 442 From the perspective of intellectual property, ideas, designs, and source code are everything—if a company were to release the source code, and allow other vendors to build on it, then what exactly would they be left to sell? Open systems did not mean anything like free, open-source, or public-domain computing. But the fact that competition required some form of collaboration was obvious as well: standard software and network systems were needed; standard markets were needed; standard norms of innovation within the constraints of standards were needed. In short, the challenge was not just the creation of competitive products but the creation of a standard infrastructure, dealing with the technical questions of availability, modifiability, and reusability of components, and the moral questions of the proper organization of competition and collaboration across diverse domains: engineers, academics, the computer industry, and the industries it computerized. What follows is the story of how UNIX entered the open-systems fray, a story in which the tension between the conceiving of openness and the demands of intellectual property is revealed. 443 Open Systems One: Operating Systems 444 In 1980 UNIX was by all accounts the most obvious choice for a standard operating system for a reason that seemed simple at the outset: it ran on more than one kind of hardware. It had been installed on DEC machines and IBM machines and Intel processors and Motorola processors—a fact exciting to many professional programmers, university computer scientists, and system administrators, many of whom also considered UNIX to be the best designed of the available operating systems. 445 There was a problem, however (there always is): UNIX belonged to AT&T, and AT&T had licensed it to multiple manufacturers over the years, in addition to allowing the source code to circulate more or less with abandon throughout the world and to be ported to a wide variety of different machine architectures. Such proliferation, albeit haphazard, was a dream come true: a single, interoperable operating system running on all kinds of hardware. Unfortunately, proliferation would also undo that dream, because it meant that as the markets for workstations and operating systems heated up, the existing versions of UNIX hardened into distinct and incompatible versions with different features and interfaces. By the mid 1980s, there were multiple competing efforts to standardize UNIX, an endeavour that eventually went haywire, resulting in the so-called UNIX wars, in which "gangs" of vendors (some on both sides of the battle) teamed up to promote competing standards. The story of how this happened is instructive, for it is a story that has been reiterated several times in the computer industry.165 165 A similar story can be told about the emergence, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, of manufacturers of "plug-compatible" devices, peripherals that plugged into IBM machines (see Takahashi, "The Rise and Fall of the Plug Compatible Manufacturers"). Similarly, in the 1990s the story of browser compatibility and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards is another recapitulation. 446 As a hybrid commercial-academic system, UNIX never entered the market as a single thing. It was licensed in various ways to different people, both academic and commercial, and contained additions and tools and other features that may or may not have originated at (or been returned to) Bell Labs. By the early 1980s, the Berkeley Software Distribution was in fact competing with the AT&T version, even though BSD was a sublicensee—and it was not the only one. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number of corporations had licensed UNIX from AT&T for use on new machines. Microsoft licensed it (and called it Xenix, rather than licensing the name UNIX as well) to be installed on Intel-based machines. IBM, Unisys, Amdahl, Sun, DEC, and Hewlett-Packard all followed suit and [pg 154] created their own versions and names: HP-UX, A/UX, AIX, Ultrix, and so on. Given the ground rules of trade secrecy and intellectual property, each of these licensed versions needed to be made legally distinct—if they were to compete with each other. Even if "UNIX" remained conceptually pure in an academic or pedagogical sense, every manufacturer would nonetheless have to tweak, to extend, to optimize in order to differentiate. After all, "if companies do nothing but adhere to standards, then all computers will become commodities, and nobody will be able to make any money."166 166 McKenna, Who's Afraid of Big Blue? 178. 447 It was thus unlikely that any of these corporations would contribute the changes they made to UNIX back into a common pool, and certainly not back to AT&T which subsequent to the 1984 divestiture finally released their own commercial version of UNIX, called UNIX System V. Very quickly, the promising "open" UNIX of the 1970s became a slough of alternative operating systems, each incompatible with the next thanks to the addition of market-differentiating features and hardware-specific tweaks. According to Pamela Gray, "By the mid-1980s, there were more than 100 versions in active use" centered around the three market leaders, AT&T's System V, Microsoft/SCO Xenix, and the BSD.167 By 1984, the differences in systems had become significant—as in the case of the BSD additions of the TCP/IP protocols, the vi editor, and the Pascal compiler—and created not only differentiation in terms of quality but also incompatibility at both the software and networking levels. 167 Pamela Gray, Open Systems. 448 Different systems of course had different user communities, based on who was the customer of whom. Eric Raymond suggests that in the mid-1980s, independent hackers, programmers, and computer scientists largely followed the fortunes of BSD: "The divide was roughly between longhairs and shorthairs; programmers and technical people tended to line up with Berkeley and BSD, more business-oriented types with AT&T and System V. The longhairs, repeating a theme from Unix's early days ten years before, liked to see themselves as rebels against a corporate empire; one of the small companies put out a poster showing an X-wing-like space fighter marked "BSD" speeding away from a huge AT&T ‘ death star' logo left broken and in flames."168 168 Eric Raymond, "Origins and History of Unix, 1969-1995," The Art of UNIX Programming, <http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch02s01.html#id2880014>. 449 So even though UNIX had become the standard operating system of choice for time-sharing, multi-user, high-performance computers by the mid-1980s, there was no such thing as UNIX. Competitors [pg 155] in the UNIX market could hardly expect the owner of the system, AT&T, to standardize it and compete with them at the same time, and the rest of the systems were in some legal sense still derivations from the original AT&T system. Indeed, in its licensing pamphlets, AT&T even insisted that UNIX was not a noun, but an adjective, as in "the UNIX system."169 169 Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 22. Also noted in Tanenbaum, "The UNIX Marketplace in 1987," 419. 450 The dawning realization that the proliferation of systems was not only spreading UNIX around the world but also spreading it thin and breaking it apart led to a series of increasingly startling and high-profile attempts to "standardize" UNIX. Given that the three major branches (BSD, which would become the industry darling as Sun's Solaris operating system; Microsoft, and later SCO Xenix; and AT&T's System V) all emerged from the same AT&T and Berkeley work done largely by Thompson, Ritchie, and Joy, one would think that standardization would be a snap. It was anything but. 451 Figuring Out Goes Haywire 452 Figuring out the moral and technical order of open systems went haywire around 1986-88, when there were no fewer than four competing international standards, represented by huge consortia of computer manufacturers (many of whom belonged to multiple consortia): POSIX, the X/Open consortium, the Open Software Foundation, and UNIX International. The blind spot of open systems had much to do with this crazy outcome: academics, industry, and government could not find ways to agree on standardization. One goal of standardization was to afford customers choice; another was to allow competition unconstrained by "artificial" means. A standard body of source code was impossible; a standard "interface definition" was open to too much interpretation; government and academic standards were too complex and expensive; no particular corporation's standard could be trusted (because they could not be trusted to reveal it in advance of their own innovations); and worst of all, customers kept buying, and vendors kept shipping, and the world was increasingly filled with diversity, not standardization. 453 UNIX proliferated quickly because of porting, leading to multiple instances of an operating system with substantially similar source code shared by academics and licensed by AT&T. But it differentiated [pg 156] just as quickly because of forking, as particular features were added to different ports. Some features were reincorporated into the "main" branch—the one Thompson and Ritchie worked on—but the bulk of these mutations spread in a haphazard way, shared through users directly or implemented in newly formed commercial versions. Some features were just that, features, but others could extend the system in ways that might make an application possible on one version, but not on another. 454 The proliferation and differentiation of UNIX, the operating system, had peculiar effects on the emerging market for UNIX, the product: technical issues entailed design and organizational issues. The original UNIX looked the way it did because of the very peculiar structure of the organization that created and sustained UNIX: Bell Labs and the worldwide community of users and developers. The newly formed competitors, conceiving of UNIX as a product distinct from the original UNIX, adopted it precisely because of its portability and because of the promise of open systems as an alternative to "big iron" mainframes. But as UNIX was funneled into existing corporations with their own design and organizational structures, it started to become incompatible with itself, and the desire for competition in open systems necessitated efforts at UNIX standardization. 455 The first step in the standardization of open systems and UNIX was the creation of what was called an "interface definition," a standard that enumerated the minimum set of functions that any version of UNIX should support at the interface level, meaning that any programmer who wrote an application could expect to interact with any version of UNIX on any machine in the same way and get the same response from the machine (regardless of the specific implementation of the operating system or the source code that was used). Interface definitions, and extensions to them, were ideally to be published and freely available. 456 The interface definition was a standard that emphasized portability, not at the source-code or operating-system level, but at the application level, allowing applications built on any version of UNIX to be installed and run on any other. The push for such a standard came first from a UNIX user group founded in 1980 by Bob Marsh and called, after the convention of file hierarchies in the UNIX interface, "/usr/group" (later renamed Uniforum). The 1984 /usr/group standard defined a set of system calls, which, however, "was [pg 157] immediately ignored and, for all practical purposes, useless."170 It seemed the field was changing too fast and UNIX proliferating and innovating too widely for such a standard to work. 170 Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 67. 457 The /usr/group standard nevertheless provided a starting point for more traditional standards organizations—the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)—to take on the task. Both institutions took the /usr/group standard as a basis for what would be called IEEE P1003 Portable Operating System Interface for Computer Environments (POSIX). Over the next three years, from 1984 to 1987, POSIX would work diligently at providing a standard interface definition for UNIX. 458 Alongside this development, the AT&T version of UNIX became the basis for a different standard, the System V Interface Definition (SVID), which attempted to standardize a set of functions similar but not identical to the /usr/group and POSIX standards. Thus emerged two competing definitions for a standard interface to a system that was rapidly proliferating into hundreds of tiny operating-system fiefdoms.171 The danger of AT&T setting the standard was not lost on any of the competing manufacturers. Even if they created a thoroughly open standard-interface definition, AT&T's version of UNIX would be the first to implement it, and they would continually have privileged knowledge of any changes: if they sought to change the implementation, they could change the standard; if they received demands that the standard be changed, they could change their implementation before releasing the new standard. 171 A case might be made that a third definition, the ANSI standard for the C programming language, also covered similar ground, which of course it would have had to in order to allow applications written on one [pg 330] operating system to be compiled and run on another (see Gray, Open Systems, 55-58; Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 70-75). 459 In response to this threat, a third entrant into the standards race emerged: X/Open, which comprised a variety of European computer manufacturers (including AT&T!) and sought to develop a standard that encompassed both SVID and POSIX. The X/Open initiative grew out of European concern about the dominance of IBM and originally included Bull, Ericsson, ICL, Nixdorf, Olivetti, Philips, and Siemens. In keeping with a certain 1980s taste for the integration of European economic activity vis-à-vis the United States and Japan, these manufacturers banded together both to distribute a unified UNIX operating system in Europe (based initially on the BSD and Sun versions of UNIX) and to attempt to standardize it at the same time. 460 X/Open represented a subtle transformation of standardization efforts and of the organizational definition of open systems. While [pg 158] the /usr/group standard was developed by individuals who used UNIX, and the POSIX standard by an acknowledged professional society (IEEE), the X/Open group was a collective of computer corporations that had banded together to fund an independent entity to help further the cause of a standard UNIX. This paradoxical situation—of a need to share a standard among all the competitors and the need to keep the details of that standardized product secret to maintain an advantage—was one that many manufacturers, especially the Europeans with their long experience of IBM's monopoly, understood as mutually destructive. Hence, the solution was to engage in a kind of organizational innovation, to create a new form of metacorporate structure that could strategically position itself as at least temporarily interested in collaboration with other firms, rather than in competition. Thus did stories and promises of open systems wend their way from the details of technical design to those of organizational design to the moral order of competition and collaboration, power and strategy. "Standards" became products that corporations sought to "sell" to their own industry through the intermediary of the consortium. 461 In 1985 and 1986 the disarrayed state of UNIX was also frustrating to the major U.S. manufacturers, especially to Sun Microsystems, which had been founded on the creation of a market for UNIX-based "workstations," high-powered networked computers that could compete with mainframes and personal computers at the same time. Founded by Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla, and Andreas Bechtolsheim, Sun had very quickly become an extraordinarily successful computer company. The business pages and magazines were keen to understand whether workstations were viable competitors to PCs, in particular to those of IBM and Microsoft, and the de facto standard DOS operating system, for which a variety of extremely successful business-, personal-, and home-computer applications were written. 462 Sun seized on the anxiety around open systems, as is evident in the ad it ran during the summer of 1987 (figure 4). The ad plays subtly on two anxieties: the first is directed at the consumer and suggests that only with Sun can one actually achieve interoperability among all of one business' computers, much less across a network or industry; the second is more subtle and plays to fears within the computer industry itself, the anxiety that Sun might merge with one [pg 159] of the big corporations, AT&T or Unisys, and corner the market in open systems by producing the de facto standard. 463 [2bits_05_04-100.png] *4 *4 4a and 4b. Open systems anxiety around mergers and compatibility. Sun Microsystems advertisement, Wall Street Journal, 9 July 1987. 464 In fact, in October 1987 Sun announced that it had made a deal with AT&T. AT&T would distribute a workstation based on Sun's SPARC line of workstations and would acquire 20 percent of Sun.172 As part of this announcement, Sun and AT&T made clear that they intended to merge two of the dominant versions of UNIX on the market: AT&T's System V and the BSD-derived Solaris. This move clearly frightened the rest of the manufacturers interested in UNIX and open systems, as it suggested a kind of super-power alignment that would restructure (and potentially dominate) the market. A 1988 article in the New York Times quotes an industry analyst who characterizes the merger as "a matter of concern at the highest levels of every major computer company in the United States, and possibly the world," and it suggests that competing manufacturers "also fear that AT&T will gradually make Unix a proprietary product, usable only on AT&T or Sun machines."173 The industry anxiety was great enough that in March Unisys (a computer manufacturer, formerly Burroughs-Sperry) announced that it would work with AT&T and Sun to bring UNIX to its mainframes and to make its [pg 160] business applications run on UNIX. Such a move was tantamount to Unisys admitting that there would be no future in proprietary high-end computing—the business on which it had hitherto built its reputation—unless it could be part of the consortium that could own the standard.174 172 "AT&T Deal with Sun Seen," New York Times, 19 October 1987, D8. 173 Thomas C. Hayesdallas, "AT&T's Unix Is a Hit at Last, and Other Companies Are Wary," New York Times, 24 February 1988, D8. 174 "Unisys Obtains Pacts for Unix Capabilities," New York Times, 10 March 1988, D4. 465 In response to this perceived collusion a group of U.S. and European companies banded together to form another rival organization—one that partially overlapped with X/Open but now included IBM—this one called the Open Software Foundation. A nonprofit corporation, the foundation included IBM, Digital Equipment, Hewlett-Packard, Bull, Nixdorf, Siemens, and Apollo Computer (Sun's most direct competitor in the workstation market). Their goal was explicitly to create a "competing standard" for UNIX that would be available on the hardware they manufactured (and based, according to some newspaper reports, on IBM's AIX, which was to be called OSF/1). AT&T appeared at first to support the foundation, suggesting that if the Open Software Foundation could come up with a standard, then AT&T would make System V compatible with it. Thus, 1988 was the summer of open love. Every major computer manufacturer in the world was now part of some consortium or another, and some were part of two—each promoting a separate standard. 466 Of all the corporations, Sun did the most to brand itself as the originator of the open-systems concept. They made very broad claims for the success of open-systems standardization, as for instance in an ad from August 1988 (figure 5), which stated in part: 467 But what's more, those sales confirm a broad acceptance of the whole idea behind Sun. 468 The Open Systems idea. Systems based on standards so universally accepted that they allow combinations of hardware and software from literally thousands of independent vendors. . . . So for the first time, you're no longer locked into the company who made your computers. Even if it's us. 469 The ad goes on to suggest that "in a free market, the best products win out," even as Sun played both sides of every standardization battle, cooperating with both AT&T and with the Open Software Foundation. But by October of that year, it was clear to Sun that [pg 161] [pg 162] the idea hadn't really become "so universal" just yet. In that month AT&T and Sun banded together with seventeen other manufacturers and formed a rival consortium: Unix International, a coalition of the willing that would back the AT&T UNIX System V version as the one true open standard. In a full-page advertisement from Halloween of 1988 (figure 6), run simultaneously in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, the rhetoric of achieved success remained, but now instead of "the Open Systems idea," it was "your demand for UNIX System V-based solutions that ushered in the era of open architecture." Instead of a standard for all open systems, it was a war of all against all, a war to assure customers that they had made, not the right choice of hardware or software, but the right choice of standard. 470 [2bits_05_05-100.png] *5 *5 It pays to be open: Sun's version of profitable and successful open systems. Sun Microsystems advertisement, New York Times, 2 August 1988. 471 The proliferation of standards and standards consortia is often referred to as the UNIX wars of the late 1980s, but the creation of such consortia did not indicate clearly drawn lines. Another metaphor that seems to have been very popular in the press at the time was that of "gang" warfare (no doubt helped along by the creation of another industry consortia informally called the Gang of Nine, which were involved in a dispute over whether MicroChannel or EISA buses should be installed in PCs). The idea of a number of companies forming gangs to fight with each other, Bloods-and-Crips style—or perhaps more Jets-and-Sharks style, minus the singing—was no doubt an appealing metaphor at the height of Los Angeles's very real and high-profile gang warfare. But as one article in the New York Times pointed out, these were strange gangs: "Since ‘ openness' and ‘ cooperation' are the buzzwords behind these alliances, the gang often asks its enemy to join. Often the enemy does so, either so that it will not seem to be opposed to openness or to keep tabs on the group. IBM was invited to join the corporation for Open Systems, even though the clear if unstated motive of the group was to dilute IBM's influence in the market. AT&T negotiated to join the Open Software Foundation, but the talks collapsed recently. Some companies find it completely consistent to be members of rival gangs. . . . About 10 companies are members of both the Open Software Foundation and its archrival Unix International."175 175 Andrew Pollack, "Computer Gangs Stake Out Turf," New York Times, 13 December 1988, D1. See also Evelyn Richards, "Computer Firms Get a Taste of ‘ Gang Warfare,'" Washington Post, 11 December 1988, K1; Brit Hume, "IBM, Once the Bully on the Block, Faces a Tough New PC Gang," Washington Post, 3 October 1988, E24. 472 [2bits_05_06-100.png] *6 *6 The UNIX Wars, Halloween 1988. UNIX International advertisement, Wall Street Journal and New York Times, 31 October 1988. 473 The proliferation of these consortia can be understood in various ways. One could argue that they emerged at a time—during the Reagan administration—when antitrust policing had diminished to [pg 163] [pg 164] the point where computer corporations did not see such collusion as a risky activity vis-à-vis antitrust policing. One could also argue that these consortia represented a recognition that the focus on hardware control (the meaning of proprietary) had been replaced with a focus on the control of the "open standard" by one or several manufacturers, that is, that competition was no longer based on superior products, but on "owning the standard." It is significant that the industry consortia quickly overwhelmed national efforts, such as the IEEE POSIX standard, in the media, an indication that no one was looking to government or nonprofits, or to university professional societies, to settle the dispute by declaring a standard, but rather to industry itself to hammer out a standard, de facto or otherwise. Yet another way to understand the emergence of these consortia is as a kind of mutual policing of the market, a kind of paranoid strategy of showing each other just enough to make sure that no one would leapfrog ahead and kill the existing, fragile competition. 474 What this proliferation of UNIX standards and consortia most clearly represents, however, is the blind spot of open systems: the difficulty of having collaboration and competition at the same time in the context of intellectual-property rules that incompletely capture the specific and unusual characteristics of software. For participants in this market, the structure of intellectual property was unassailable—without it, most participants assumed, innovation would cease and incentives disappear. Despite the fact that secrecy haunted the industry, its customers sought both openness and compatibility. These conflicting demands proved irresolvable. 475 Denouement 476 Ironically, the UNIX wars ended not with the emergence of a winner, but with the reassertion of proprietary computing: Microsoft Windows and Windows NT. Rather than open systems emerging victorious, ushering in the era of seamless integration of diverse components, the reverse occurred: Microsoft managed to grab a huge share of computer markets, both desktop and high-performance, by leveraging its brand, the ubiquity of DOS, and application-software developers' dependence on the "Wintel" monster (Windows plus Intel chips). Microsoft triumphed, largely for the same reasons the open-systems dream failed: the legal structure of intellectual [pg 165] property favored a strong corporate monopoly on a single, branded product over a weak array of "open" and competing components. There was no large gain to investors, or to corporations, from an industry of nice guys sharing the source code and making the components work together. Microsoft, on the other hand, had decided to do so internal to itself; it did not necessarily need to form consortia or standardize its operating systems, if it could leverage its dominance in the market to spread the operating system far and wide. It was, as standards observers like to say, the triumph of de facto standardization over de jure. It was a return to the manacled wretches of IBM's monopoly—but with a new dungeon master. 477 The denouement of the UNIX standards story was swift: AT&T sold its UNIX System Labs (including all of the original source and rights) to Novell in 1993, who sold it in turn to SCO two years later. Novell sold (or transferred) the trademark name UNIX™ to the X/Open group, which continued to fight for standardization, including a single universal UNIX specification. In 1996 X/Open and the Open Software Foundation merged to form the Open Group.176 The Open Group eventually joined forces with IEEE to turn POSIX into a single UNIX specification in 2001. They continue to push the original vision of open systems, though they carefully avoid using the name or concept, referring instead to the trademarked mouthful "Boundaryless Information Flow" and employing an updated and newly inscrutable rhetoric: "Boundaryless Information Flow, a shorthand representation of ‘ access to integrated information to support business process improvements' represents a desired state of an enterprise's infrastructure and is specific to the business needs of the organization."177 176 "What Is Unix?" The Unix System, <http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline.html>. 177 "About the Open Group," The Open Group, <http://www.opengroup.org/overview/vision-mission.htm>. 478 The Open Group, as well as many other participants in the history of open systems, recognize the emergence of "open source" as a return to the now one true path of boundaryless information flow. Eric Raymond, of course, sees continuity and renewal (not least of which in his own participation in the Open Source movement) and in his Art of UNIX Programming says, "The Open Source movement is building on this stable foundation and is creating a resurgence of enthusiasm for the UNIX philosophy. In many ways Open Source can be seen as the true delivery of Open Systems that will ensure it continues to go from strength to strength."178 178 "What Is Unix?" The Unix System, <http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline.html>. 479 This continuity, of course, deliberately disavows the centrality of the legal component, just as Raymond and the Open Source [pg 166] Initiative had in 1998. The distinction between a robust market in UNIX operating systems and a standard UNIX-based infrastructure on which other markets and other activities can take place still remains unclear to even those closest to the money and machines. It does not yet exist, and may well never come to. 480 The growth of Free Software in the 1980s and 1990s depended on openness as a concept and component that was figured out during the UNIX wars. It was during these wars that the Free Software Foundation (and other groups, in different ways) began to recognize the centrality of the issue of intellectual property to the goal of creating an infrastructure for the successful creation of open systems.179 The GNU (GNU's Not Unix) project in particular, but also the X Windows system at MIT, the Remote Procedure Call and Network File System (NFS) systems created by Sun, and tools like sendmail and BIND were each in their own way experiments with alternative licensing arrangements and were circulating widely on a variety of the UNIX versions in the late 1980s. Thus, the experience of open systems, while technically a failure as far as UNIX was concerned, was nonetheless a profound learning experience for an entire generation of engineers, hackers, geeks, and entrepreneurs. Just as the UNIX operating system had a pedagogic life of its own, inculcating itself into the minds of engineers as the paradigm of an operating system, open systems had much the same effect, realizing an inchoate philosophy of openness, interconnection, compatibility, interoperability—in short, availability and modifiability—that was in conflict with intellectual-property structures as they existed. To put it in Freudian terms: the neurosis of open systems wasn't cured, but the structure of its impossibility had become much clearer to everyone. UNIX, the operating system, did not disappear at all—but UNIX, the market, did. 179 Larry McVoy was an early voice, within Sun, arguing for solving the open-systems problem by turning to Free Software. Larry McVoy, "The Sourceware Operating System Proposal," 9 November 1993, <http://www.bitmover.com/lm/papers/srcos.html>. 481 Open Systems Two: Networks 482 The struggle to standardize UNIX as a platform for open systems was not the only open-systems struggle; alongside the UNIX wars, another "religious war" was raging. The attempt to standardize networks—in particular, protocols for the inter-networking of multiple, diverse, and autonomous networks of computers—was also a key aspect of the open-systems story of the 1980s.180 The war [pg 167] between the TCP/IP and OSI was also a story of failure and surprising success: the story of a successful standard with international approval (the OSI protocols) eclipsed by the experimental, military-funded TCP/IP, which exemplified an alternative and unusual standards process. The moral-technical orders expressed by OSI and TCP/IP are, like that of UNIX, on the border between government, university, and industry; they represent conflicting social imaginaries in which power and legitimacy are organized differently and, as a result, expressed differently in the technology. 180 The distinction between a protocol, an implementation and a standard is important: Protocols are descriptions of the precise terms by which two computers can communicate (i.e., a dictionary and a handbook for communicating). An implementation is the creation of software that uses a protocol (i.e., actually does the communicating; thus two implementations using the same protocol should be able to share data. A standard defines which protocol should be used by which computers, for what purposes. It may or may not define the protocol, but will set limits on changes to that protocol. 483 OSI and TCP/IP started with different goals: OSI was intended to satisfy everyone, to be the complete and comprehensive model against which all competing implementations would be validated; TCP/IP, by contrast, emphasized the easy and robust interconnection of diverse networks. TCP/IP is a protocol developed by bootstrapping between standard and implementation, a mode exemplified by the Requests for Comments system that developed alongside them as part of the Arpanet project. OSI was a "model" or reference standard developed by internationally respected standards organizations. 484 In the mid-1980s OSI was en route to being adopted internationally, but by 1993 it had been almost completely eclipsed by TCP/IP. The success of TCP/IP is significant for three reasons: (1) availability—TCP/IP was itself available via the network and development open to anyone, whereas OSI was a bureaucratically confined and expensive standard and participation was confined to state and corporate representatives, organized through ISO in Geneva; (2) modifiability—TCP/IP could be copied from an existing implementation (such as the BSD version of UNIX) and improved, whereas OSI was a complex standard that had few existing implementations available to copy; and (3) serendipity—new uses that took advantage of availability and modifiability sprouted, including the "killer app" that was the World Wide Web, which was built to function on existing TCP/IP-based networks, convincing many manufacturers to implement that protocol instead of, or in addition to, OSI. 485 The success of TCP/IP over OSI was also significant because of the difference in the standardization processes that it exemplified. The OSI standard (like all official international standards) is conceived and published as an aid to industrial growth: it was imagined according to the ground rules of intellectual property and as an attempt to facilitate the expansion of markets in networking. [pg 168] OSI would be a "vendor-neutral" standard: vendors would create their own, secret implementations that could be validated by OSI and thereby be expected to interoperate with other OSI-validated systems. By stark contrast, the TCP/IP protocols were not published (in any conventional sense), nor were the implementations validated by a legitimate international-standards organization; instead, the protocols are themselves represented by implementations that allow connection to the network itself (where the TCP/IP protocols and implementations are themselves made available). The fact that one can only join the network if one possesses or makes an implementation of the protocol is generally seen as the ultimate in validation: it works.181 In this sense, the struggle between TCP/IP and OSI is indicative of a very familiar twentieth-century struggle over the role and extent of government planning and regulation (versus entrepreneurial activity and individual freedom), perhaps best represented by the twin figures of Friedrich Hayek and Maynard Keynes. In this story, it is Hayek's aversion to planning and the subsequent privileging of spontaneous order that eventually triumphs, not Keynes's paternalistic view of the government as a neutral body that absorbs or encourages the swings of the market. 181 The advantages of such an unplanned and unpredictable network have come to be identified in hindsight as a design principle. See Gillespie, "Engineering a Principle" for an excellent analysis of the history of "end to end" or "stupid" networks. 486 Bootstrapping Networks 487 The "religious war" between TCP/IP and OSI occurred in the context of intense competition among computer manufacturers and during a period of vibrant experimentation with computer networks worldwide. As with most developments in computing, IBM was one of the first manufacturers to introduce a networking system for its machines in the early 1970s: the System Network Architecture (SNA). DEC followed suit with Digital Network Architecture (DECnet or DNA), as did Univac with Distributed Communications Architecture (DCA), Burroughs with Burroughs Network Architecture (BNA), and others. These architectures were, like the proprietary operating systems of the same era, considered closed networks, networks that interconnected a centrally planned and specified number of machines of the same type or made by the same manufacturer. The goal of such networks was to make connections internal to a firm, even if that involved geographically widespread systems (e.g., from branch to headquarters). Networks were also to be products. 488 The 1970s and 1980s saw extraordinarily vibrant experimentation with academic, military, and commercial networks. Robert Metcalfe had developed Ethernet at Xerox PARC in the mid-1970s, and IBM later created a similar technology called "token ring." In the 1980s the military discovered that the Arpanet was being used predominantly by computer scientists and not just for military applications, and decided to break it into MILNET and CSNET.182 Bulletin Board Services, which connected PCs to each other via modems to download files, appeared in the late 1970s. Out of this grew Tom Jennings's very successful experiment called FidoNet.183 In the 1980s an existing social network of university faculty on the East Coast of the United States started a relatively successful network called BITNET (Because It's There Network) in the mid-1980s.184 The Unix to Unix Copy Protocol (uucp), which initially enabled the Usenet, was developed in the late 1970s and widely used until the mid-1980s to connect UNIX computers together. In 1984 the NSF began a program to fund research in networking and created the first large backbones for NSFNet, successor to the CSNET and Arpanet.185 182 William Broad, "Global Network Split as Safeguard," New York Times, 5 October 1983, A13. 183 See the incomparable BBS: The Documentary, DVD, directed by Jason Scott (Boston: Bovine Ignition Systems, 2005), <http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/>. 184 Grier and Campbell, "A Social History of Bitnet and Listserv 1985-1991." 185 On Usenet, see Hauben and Hauben, Netizens. See also Pfaffenberger, "‘A Standing Wave in the Web of Our Communications.'" 489 In the 1970s telecommunications companies and spin-off start-ups experimented widely with what were called "videotex" systems, of which the most widely implemented and well-known is Minitel in France.186 Such systems were designed for consumer users and often provided many of the now widespread services available on the Internet in a kind of embryonic form (from comparison shopping for cars, to directory services, to pornography).187 By the late 1970s, videotex systems were in the process of being standardized by the Commité Consultative de Information, Technologie et Télécommunications (CCITT) at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in Geneva. These standards efforts would eventually be combined with work of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) on OSI, which had originated from work done at Honeywell.188 186 Schmidt and Werle, Coordinating Technology, chap. 7. 187 See, for example, Martin, Viewdata and the Information Society. 188 There is little information on the development of open systems; there is, however, a brief note from William Stallings, author of perhaps the most widely used textbook on networking, at "The Origins of OSI," <http://williamstallings.com/Extras/OSI.html>. 490 One important feature united almost all of these experiments: the networks of the computer manufacturers were generally piggybacked, or bootstrapped, onto existing telecommunications infrastructures built by state-run or regulated monopoly telecommunications firms. This situation inevitably spelled grief, for telecommunications providers are highly regulated entities, while the computer industry has been almost totally unregulated from its [pg 170] inception. Since an increasingly core part of the computer industry's business involved transporting signals through telecommunications systems without being regulated to do so, the telecommunications industry naturally felt themselves at a disadvantage.189 Telecommunications companies were not slow to respond to the need for data communications, but their ability to experiment with products and practices outside the scope of telephony and telegraphy was often hindered by concerns about antitrust and monopoly.190 The unregulated computer industry, by contrast, saw the tentativeness of the telecommunications industry (or national PTTs) as either bureaucratic inertia or desperate attempts to maintain control and power over existing networks—though no computer manufacturer relished the idea of building their own physical network when so many already existed. 189 Brock, The Second Information Revolution is a good introductory source for this conflict, at least in its policy outlines. The Federal Communications Commission issued two decisions (known as "Computer 1" and "Computer 2") that attempted to deal with this conflict by trying to define what counted as voice communication and what as data. 190 Brock, The Second Information Revolution, chap. 10. 491 TCP/IP and OSI have become emblematic of the split between the worlds of telecommunications and computing; the metaphors of religious wars or of blood feuds and cold wars were common.191 A particularly arch account from this period is Carl Malamud's Exploring the Internet: A Technical Travelogue, which documents Malamud's (physical) visits to Internet sites around the globe, discussions (and beer) with networking researchers on technical details of the networks they have created, and his own typically geeky, occasionally offensive takes on cultural difference.192 A subtheme of the story is the religious war between Geneva (in particular the ITU) and the Internet: Malamud tells the story of asking the ITU to release its 19,000-page "blue book" of standards on the Internet, to facilitate its adoption and spread. 191 Drake, "The Internet Religious War." 192 Malamud, Exploring the Internet; see also Michael M. J. Fischer, "Worlding Cyberspace." 492 The resistance of the ITU and Malamud's heroic if quixotic attempts are a parable of the moral-technical imaginaries of openness—and indeed, his story draws specifically on the usable past of Giordano Bruno.193 The "bruno" project demonstrates the gulf that exists between two models of legitimacy—those of ISO and the ITU—in which standards represent the legal and legitimate consensus of a regulated industry, approved by member nations, paid for and enforced by governments, and implemented and adhered to by corporations. 193 The usable past of Giordano Bruno is invoked by Malamud to signal the heretical nature of his own commitment to openly publishing standards that ISO was opposed to releasing. Bruno's fate at the hands of the Roman Inquisition hinged in some part on his acceptance of the Copernican cosmology, so he has been, like Galileo, a natural figure for revolutionary claims during the 1990s. 493 Opposite ISO is the ad hoc, experimental style of Arpanet and Internet researchers, in which standards are freely available and implementations represent the mode of achieving consensus, rather than the outcome of the consensus. In reality, such a rhetorical [pg 171] opposition is far from absolute: many ISO standards are used on the Internet, and ISO remains a powerful, legitimate standards organization. But the clash of established (telecommunications) and emergent (computer-networking) industries is an important context for understanding the struggle between OSI and TCP/IP. 494 The need for standard networking protocols is unquestioned: interoperability is the bread and butter of a network. Nonetheless, the goals of the OSI and the TCP/IP protocols differed in important ways, with profound implications for the shape of that interoperability. OSI's goals were completeness, control, and comprehensiveness. OSI grew out of the telecommunications industry, which had a long history of confronting the vicissitudes of linking up networks and facilitating communication around the world, a problem that required a strong process of consensus and negotiation among large, powerful, government-run entities, as well as among smaller manufacturers and providers. OSI's feet were firmly planted in the international standardization organizations like OSI and the ITU (an organization as old as telecommunications itself, dating to the 1860s). 495 Even if they were oft-mocked as slow, bureaucratic, or cumbersome, the processes of ISO and ITU—based in consensus, international agreement, and thorough technical specification—are processes of unquestioned legitimacy. The representatives of nations and corporations who attend ISO and ITU standards discussions, and who design, write, and vote on these standards, are usually not bureaucrats, but engineers and managers directly concerned with the needs of their constituency. The consensus-oriented process means that ISO and ITU standards attempt to satisfy all members' goals, and as such they tend to be very large, complex, and highly specific documents. They are generally sold to corporations and others who need to use them, rather than made freely available, a fact that until recently reflected their legitimacy, rather than lack thereof. 496 TCP/IP, on the other hand, emerged from very different conditions.194 These protocols were part of a Department of Defense-funded experimental research project: Arpanet. The initial Arpanet protocols (the Network Control Protocol, or NCP) were insufficient, and TCP/IP was an experiment in interconnecting two different "packet-switched networks": the ground-line-based Arpanet network and a radio-wave network called Packet Radio.195 The [pg 172] problem facing the designers was not how to accommodate everyone, but merely how to solve a specific problem: interconnecting two technically diverse networks, each with autonomous administrative boundaries, but forcing neither of them to give up the system or the autonomy. 194 Abbate, Inventing the Internet; Salus, Casting the Net; Galloway, Protocol; and Brock, The Second Information Revolution. For practitioner histories, see Kahn et al., "The Evolution of the Internet as a Global Information System"; Clark, "The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols." 195 Kahn et al., "The Evolution of the Internet as a Global Information System," 134-140; Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 114-36. 497 Until the mid-1980s, the TCP/IP protocols were resolutely research-oriented, and not the object of mainstream commercial interest. Their development reflected a core set of goals shared by researchers and ultimately promoted by the central funding agency, the Department of Defense. The TCP/IP protocols are often referred to as enabling packet-switched networks, but this is only partially correct; the real innovation of this set of protocols was a design for an "inter-network," a system that would interconnect several diverse and autonomous networks (packet-switched or circuit-switched), without requiring them to be transformed, redesigned, or standardized—in short, by requiring only standardization of the intercommunication between networks, not standardization of the network itself. In the first paper describing the protocol Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf motivated the need for TCP/IP thus: "Even though many different and complex problems must be solved in the design of an individual packet-switching network, these problems are manifestly compounded when dissimilar networks are interconnected. Issues arise which may have no direct counterpart in an individual network and which strongly influence the way in which Internetwork communication can take place."196 196 Kahn and Cerf, "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication," 637. 498 The explicit goal of TCP/IP was thus to share computer resources, not necessarily to connect two individuals or firms together, or to create a competitive market in networks or networking software. Sharing between different kinds of networks implied allowing the different networks to develop autonomously (as the