Gabriella Coleman, cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Media Culture and Communication at NYU spoke at the Graduate Center about her research on the free and open source software movement and the hacker culture last Thursday. I couldn’t make it to her talk but was able to read her article “Code is Speech.” In this article, she investigates how Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) developers have contested and rewritten central concepts of modern liberalism, especially freedom of speech, by illustrating the cases of two programmers, Jon Johansen and Dmitry Sklyarov, and the protests provoked by their arrests between 1999 and 2003. Her article touches upon the sensitive issues such as intellectual property, copyright, and the notion of originality, which N. Katherine Hayles also problematizes as the products of the 18C liberal humanism in her book My Mother Was a Computer. Coleman writes:
“This is key to emphasize, for even if we can postulate a relation between a product of creative work—source code—and a democratic ideal—free speech, there is no necessary or fundamental connection between them (Ratto 2005). Many academics and programmers have argued convincingly that the act of programming should be thought of as literary—‘a culture innovative and revisionary close reading’ (Black 2002; see also Chopra and Dexter 2007). As with print culture of the last 200 years (Johns 2000), this literary culture of programming has often been dictated and delineated by a copyright regime whose logic is one of restriction. New free speech sensibilities, which fundamentally challenge the coupling between copyright and literary creation, must therefore be seen as a political act and choice, requiring sustained labor and creativity to stabilize these connections” (449).
Coleman’s words remind me of Mikhail’s recent post in which he weighed in on the question of openness of the VOCAT. I was excited to read that he believed the VOCAT should be free and open wide to other institutions and other developers, to benefit not only many other students and schools but also the tool itself so that it may evolve in ways we’ve never foreseen.
I also think that that’s how William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace,” envisions the Net in his cyberpunk classic Neuromancer. With all the futurist horrors of mechanization of humanity imagined by the novel, it implies that the net can still be the brave new world for us as long as it remains open and public.
I also read Coleman’s article in preparation for attending her talk, but she ended up focusing on hacker/geek culture from a pretty anthropological point of view. She went from parsing out the playfully (aggressively?) offensive language hackers (or geeks) use on sites like Encyclopedia Dramatica, 4chan, and Something Awful, to the discourse generated by their protests against the Church of Scientology’s message, as well as its attempt to crush parody and dissent (‘Epic Lulz’).
She didn’t limit her discussion of geek culture to the virtual community, as she has also done quite a bit of participant observation fieldwork among this group (she’s an anthropologist). She mentioned in the Q&A that, having attended some of their live protests, she was struck by the gender and ethnic diversity of the group. She also talked about how geeks’ love for science and technology may sensitize them to the ways these get incorporated into Scientology’s message, and how L. Ron Hubbard’s being a sci-fi author (i.e., ostensibly ‘one of us’) was part of the problem. Considering that they don Guy Fawkes masks for these protests (like in V for Vendetta), I thought it was ironic when she drew a big V on the projector to visually depict the conflict, showing Scientology and Geeks on opposite sides, but coming together at the point of the V.
By the way, she mentioned in passing that Scientology’s litigiousness was one disincentive to publishing on this topic. Maybe that’s why this is a comment instead of a post?