Mute Vol 2 #1 - Underneath the Knowledge Commons

If the production and dissemination of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) is a social movement, then what is its constituency and what is it fighting for? Is FLOSS a harbinger of communism, a new form of commons, or the avant garde of capitalism? Mute canvassed a small but varied selection of cultural producers about the role and significance of FLOSS in their projects

Your Name: James Wallbank

Name of Organisation: Access Space

Location: Sheffield

Website: http://access.lowtech.org/

Email: rti@lowtech.org

Recent Projects: The Linux Open Source Sound Project (LOSS): http://access.lowtech.org/loss/; Tools + Techniques 3 (Software talks):
http://access.lowtech.org/events/tools+techs3/

1. What is your organisation’s mission?
Access Space provides an open access media lab where people learn, create and communicate. We only use FLOSS and what we like to call ‘trailing edge technology’ – late model computers which other organisations feel are redundant, just because they can’t run the latest version of Windows.

2. What role does FLOSS play in your organisation’s economy?
FLOSS saves Access Space around £20K per annum in hardware and software costs. It’s obvious how we make software savings – but just as important are the savings we make in hardware. Access Space only uses recycled computers which we can recover for nothing.
Typically, we use computers which are three to five years old. Interestingly, a recent government report on free, open source software suggests that, if you are committed to a continuous policy of software upgrades, Linux effectively DOUBLES the life of a computer.
3. Which communities do you support and how?

Our regular participants are mainly from the Sheffield area. Now we’re working with eight UK organisations to spread the Access Space ‘Free, Open Source Software, Recycled Hardware/Skill-Sharing Community’ model.

4. How do you participate within the production of code or how do you see your role within the FLOSS ecology?
We don’t see our role as code production. In fact, we do produce code snippets occasionally, and we are currently working with a local open source software consultancy, Hypercube Systems, to develop accounting software. Our real, ‘Value Added’ contributions to the Open Source meme are demonstration and advocacy. We run complex network systems in a difficult, real world environment (a multi-user network with constantly changing client machines) and we talk about it. Our network is robust and effective (more than can be said for many), and could be used in a variety of lab and community circumstances.

I think it’s really, REALLY important that the open source community acknowledges that coding is just a part of spreading the model. Look at Microsoft – they wouldn’t be in the dominant position they’re in if coders were their only employees! They also employ advocates, lobbyists, educators, market researchers, advertisers, demonstrators, distributors, bug-checkers, trainers, support technicians, customer relations wonks and many more. For FLOSS to really change the world (it is already, and it will even more so!) all of these roles need to be played.

5. Do you see your work/labour as resisting, in symbiosis with, or exploited by capitalist production?
The wider ‘Free Culture’ movement, of which open source Software is one instance, actually starts to make this sort of terminology obsolete. Terms like ‘capitalist production’ tend to assume a model in which scarcity is closely linked with value – whereas in the digital and cultural realm, abundance (even ubiquity) are more closely linked to value, in a circumstance in which there are, potentially, huge surpluses of resources.

6. What are the primary obstacles you face?
None that aren’t visibly eroding as we speak!

7. What licence, if any, do you use?
We like the GPL, and we like Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike licences, which are very similar to the GPL. We’re slightly sceptical about ‘non-commercial’, which can restrict exciting opportunities for artists (and others) to use software and make a living.

8. Do you see yourself as contributing to a commons?
Absolutely!

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Your Name: Aymeric Mansoux

Name of Organisation: GOTO10

Location: N/A

Website: http://goto10.org

Email: contact@goto10.org

Recent Projects: Pure:Dyne; Packet Forth; Make Art festival ... (works in progress)

1. What is your organisation’s mission?
The mission of GOTO10 is to explore and support the fields of digital art, with a strong emphasis on open source software. We develop our own free software as well as trying to close the gap between the basic user and obscure developer nests. We focus on documentation by providing how to’s and guides for various applications, and we are also now building a Linux based operating system dedicated to real time audio and video software in a user friendly environment. Another important point in GOTO10 is the regular production of live events such as workshops, concerts, installations and lectures. 
 
3. Which communities do you support and how?
Initially, we tend to support ideas. Although ideally we offer services and support to communities where FLOSS is used as a basis for creativity, we also help other groups or individuals who belong to a different world. For us a production tool is a transitional object and the concept remains the most important element.

5. Do you see your work/labour as resisting, in symbiosis with, or exploited by capitalist production?
To be quite optimistic, I think we are neither resisting nor being exploited. These terms are marked with a very negative weight and some quite childish paranoia. To the contrary, I prefer to think we’re in a phase of social and economic contamination. Our (FLOSS communities’) ideas are ever more present in the media and everyone knows or has heard the term ‘open source’. It is hard to imagine that platforms like Sourceforge were considered a futile playground for weirdos just a few years ago. Who would have imagined the overwhelming win on EU Patents? Who would have thought of Linux certification for desktop computers?

We are in a transitional phase and this is being achieved without revolution, wars or aggression which are the last breaths of a sick system. FLOSS is an intellectual virus, not a gun.

7. What licence, if any, do you use?
Any free licence that will fit any given project at any given time. We are not license fanatics or priests.

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Your Name: Agnese Trocchi

Name of Organisation: New Global Vision (NGV)

Location: N/A

Website: http://www.ngvision.org/

Email: ngv@ecn.org

1. What is your organisation’s mission?
To create an historical archive of independent videos. To organise a distribution network through peer-to-peer, FTP servers and RSS feeds. To establish a producers’ and distributors’ community which agrees on the use of Creative Commons licences and keeps track of its activities through ad hoc blogs. To develop a publishing, archiving, distribution set of software which is available for other communities to use. To be a useful tool for independent television stations which need to share and retrieve contents (see the Telestreets network: http://www.telestreet.it/)

2. What role does FLOSS play in your organisation’s economy?
Without free software our project wouldn’t exist at all. For two main reasons: the first is that free software allows us to build the technology to manage the archive and to make it available to users, from the website to the servers that host the archives. The second one is that only through free software have we been able to share and improve our knowledge and so be able to create the tools we need.

3. Which communities do you support and how?
We support the independent videomakers’ community by giving it a tool to circulate its productions, and the independent TV commmunity by giving it a pool of materials to insert into its daily programmes.

5. Do you see your work/labour as resisting, in symbiosis with, or exploited by capitalist production?
Our work is not just resistant to capitalist production: it’s creating new models of production. But as a community of independent videomakers we may say that (while waiting for the new world) we are still exploited by and in symbiosis with capitalist production.

6. What are the primary obstacles you face?
The lack of time that developers and editors can put into the work. We don’t earn money from the project, and so we have to work on it in our spare time. Sometimes the most difficult thing is to meet face to face as these kinds of meetings are very important, but we are scattered all over Italy.

7. What licence, if any, do you use?
CC licences are applied to videos in the archive and we use the GPL for the set of softwares.

8. Do you see yourself as contributing to a commons?
Of course! NGV is one of the clearest examples of the creation of spaces for a commons, not only as regards licences, but also for the efforts that we put into accessibility, to content production and also for the will to develop a permanent archive.

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Your Name: Chris

Name of Organisation: RampArt Hacklab.

Location: RampArt Social Centre, London

Website: http://wiki.hacklab.org.uk; http://www.rampart.co.nr

Email: guano@onetel.com

Recent Projects: RampArt Hacklab

1. What is your organisation’s mission?
Spread the word about free/open source software, provide a resource for those wanting to actively work for a better society, have fun.

2. What role does FLOSS play in your organisation’s economy?
The decision to use FLOSS was not at all based in economics. Most software is free (gratis) if you know where to look. The free (libre) aspect was all important.

3. Which communities do you support and how?
The loose global network of activists, individuals and groups engaged in social activism, by providing a computer resource for use and for skill sharing.

4. How do you participate within the production of code or how do you see your role within the FLOSS ecology?
I don’t have any involvement with the production of code if I can persuade others to do it. I see my role as promoting FLOSS.

5. Do you see your work/labour as resisting, in symbiosis with, or exploited by capitalist production?
Definitely resisting by using and promoting alternatives to the products of capitalism.

6. What are the primary obstacles you face?
Propaganda/ mind share.

7. What licence, if any, do you use?
Operating system: BSD licence; X Window System: MIT X Window System licence; Other utilities: GPL and probably many others.

8. Do you see yourself as contributing to a commons?
Not directly as I don’t create products but indirectly by promoting the products of the commons.

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Your Name: Jaromil

Name of Organisation: Rastasoft

Location: Nomadic

Website: http://dyne.org, http://rastasoft.org, http://lab.dyne.org/Jaromil

Email: jaromil@dyne.org

Recent Projects: http://montevideo.dyne.org/trac.cgi/wiki/IvySync; http://fakiir.dyne.org; http://freej.dyne.org;
 http://dynebolic.org; http://muse.dyne.org

1. What is your organisation’s mission?
This is Rasta software.
Jah Rastafari Livity bless our Freedom! This is free software, you should share it for the good of yourself and your people, respect others and let them express, be free and let others be free. Live long and prosper in Peace!

But remember there is no Peace without Justice. This software is about Resistance ina Babylon world which tries to control more and more the way we communicate and we share information and knowledge. This software is for all those who cannot afford to have the latest expensive hardware to speak out their words of consciousness and good will. This software has a full range of applications for the production and not only the fruition of information, it’s a full multimedia studio and has no reason to envy other proprietary systems, because freedom and the sharing of knowledge are solid principles for evolution and that’s where this software comes from.
Hic Sunt Leones. And much Blessings in Jah. Luv to All Those who still Resist. Selah.

2. What role does FLOSS play in your economy?
I have no business. I squat houses for a living. My economy is made out of solidarity. Thanks for yours.

3. Which communities do you support and how?
ASCII http://scii.nl, Indymedia and some others through writing code, recycling hardware, being a militant activist.

4. How do you participate within the production of code or how do you see your role within the FLOSS ecology?
I like Object Oriented and Multithreaded design. I code in C/C and Assembler. I like the way GNU/Linux, BSD and some other efforts are evolving, I’ve been contributing for more than 5 years and I do enjoy it a lot.

5. Do you see your work/labour as resisting, in symbiosis with, or exploited by capitalist production?
I don’t know. I don’t think anyone exploits me when using my software, I did it for a purpose and I’m happy to share it with people. I’m an anti-capitalist, which is not old fashioned since capitalism is still there, and I fight it, in many ways, including my code. Capitalism is about exploitation, in any case.

6. What are the primary obstacles you face?
Finding a house for living, finding food, finding peace to code.

7. What licence, if any, do you use?
GNU GPL for my code, Creative Commons for other things. In the early days I used Artistic Licence, Public Licence and Open Audio License from the EFF.

8. Do you see yourself as contributing to a commons?
Yes, indeed.

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Your Name: Yves Degoyon
Name of Organisation: Riereta, Hackitectura, Indymedia Barcelona
Location: Barcelona
Website: http://www.riereta.net, http://www.hackitectura.net
Email: ydegoyon@free.fr
Recent Projects: Map-o-matix – collaborative environment for tactical cartography:
http://mapomatix.sf.net; GISS/Gollum: streaming tools for social networks – http://gollum.artefacte.org; PiDiP – video extensions for Pure Data: http://ydegoyon.free.fr/pidip.html

1. What is your organisation’s mission?
To develop accessible and open source software and build transnational networks for independent online medias, covering events from the World Social Forum 2005 to some hackmeeting in some anonymous place.

2. What role does FLOSS play in your organisation’s economy?
All media and streams produced are made with open source software, and some specific tools http://mapomatix.sf.net are developed for our needs under the GPL.

3. Which communities do you support and how?
Indymedia, Plug‘n’Politix, No One Is Illegal, Rotorrr http://www.rotorrr.org, V2V.

4. How do you participate within the production of code or how do you see your role within the FLOSS ecology?
We are free software dealers.

5. Do you see your work/labour as resisting, in symbiosis with, or exploited by capitalist production?
Our work is an alternative to the mainstream media (Al-jwarizmi versus CNN).

6. Why are the primary obstacles you face?
People wanting to rejoin the institutions. Academic writers disconnected from real people.

7. What licence, if any, do you use?
GPL.

8. Do you see yourself as contributing to a commons?
Ya, all our media content is free.

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Your Name: Simon Yuill

Name of Organisation: N/A

Location: Glasgow

Website: http://www.spring-alpha.org

Email: simon@lipparosa.org

Recent Projects: http://www.spring-alpha.org; http://www.yourmachines.org

1. What is your mission?
I don’t see myself in terms of ‘missions’ and such, I’m tactical rather than strategic if you like.

2. What role does FLOSS play in your economy?
Both creatively and financially it provides far greater possibilities – it foregrounds the cost of personal effort over packaged product (which is as it should be)

3. Which communities do you support and how?
No one group directly at present, but my work connects with various communities, principally other Glasgow based artists and local communities

4. How do you participate within the production of code or how do you see your role within the FLOSS ecology?
I write code. The spring_alpha project is not only implementing existing FLOSS (such as Soya 3D) but also providing a new style of ‘live-coding’ simulation tool which is available as a framework (under GPL) for others to use. I also encourage others to use or get involved with FLOSS through public workshops, talks, writing, (gentle) ranting and informal get togethers (we have a version of OpenLab in Glasgow which meets in people’s flats).

5. Do you see your work/labour as resisting, in symbiosis with, or exploited by capitalist production?
Even if you choose the first option, resisting, under current conditions you are always implicated in the latter two. Dealing with this is the issue rather than simply claiming one status.

6. Why are the primary obstacles you face?
Getting up in the morning, but as I don’t have a job this is not so bad.

7. What licence, if any, do you use?
GPL, Free Documentation Licence and versions of Creative Commons Licences depending on what’s appropriate.

8. Do you see yourself as contributing to a commons?
Yes.

The OpenMute project explains its approach to the public domain after four years of using and contributing to FLOSS

As a sister project of Mute, and in the context of Mute’s knowledge commons issue, OpenMute would like to clarify its position and relationship to FLOSS and the public domain. OpenMute involves different people from Mute, and the experiences, knowledge and day to day practices of those individuals bring a different and complimentary perspective to the issue of the 21st century commons.

The OpenMute project started in 2001 to provide FLOSS communications web tools to cultural and community groups, with an understanding of their shared circumstances: limited resources, mixed levels of computer skills, and often little experience of the networked communications that FLOSS facilitates. As an advocate of the public domain, OpenMute adopted FLOSS as a tactical media toolset for its ability to challenge the ongoing conversion of everyday knowledge into property. When shared conventions from daily life can be borrowed and patented just because they have been replicated in computer code, the office becomes the virtual office and CompuCorpX now own it. FLOSS and its associated strategies are a way of opposing these exploitative types of property and social relationships.

OpenMute’s project now encompasses the following services: the free as in beer OM1 - a web CMS tool set now running over seven hundred individual web sites; the paid for OMXTRA; Web2POD print on demand, high quality low cost book production and distribution services; and recently, UserLand, a UK workshop tour with artists from across Europe advocating FLOSS cultural practice.

The public domain, which FLOSS is one method of contributing to, isn’t a clear cut situation and is relatively new (as is the postNet world). OpenMute has taken the approach of being an active FLOSS user/participant/contributor, in order to help secure the public domain as a place of radical change and liberation alongside other groups. FLOSS is one component of what OpenMute terms the Free Technology Movement which also comprises; Free networks – community run and owned networks; Free hardware standards – non proprietary standards; Peer2Peer networking – such as Pirate Byran; Open standards – W3C; Open content – WikiPedia; Open IP agreements – Creative Commons.

Although many FLOSS practitioners might have stated their political agnosticism, it is this perceived neutrality that allows on the one hand the anti-Capitalist movement to adopt FLOSS so readily and, on the other hand, corporations like IBM to see FLOSS as a more agile strategy for developing software and gaining ground on competitors like Microsoft.

OpenMute is funded by the Arts Council of England for its CMS web services 0M1/OMXTRA and its UK FLOSS tour, UserLand. In a UK context OpenMute is in the same position as other FLOSS initiatives supported by the UK Government, whether it’s in the area of education, the voluntary sector or community groups. The situation is one of accidental government involvement, with bottom up initiatives requesting support rather than the government having any policy or programmes which actively support FLOSS.

At a recent FLOSS voluntary groups event, SocialSource 2005, this situation was clearly underlined again and again as groups talked about their experiences. An example was Bristol Wireless which runs a scheme to provide primary school pupils with Linux installed laptops and a wireless connection to the school. The weak link is that the teachers are not trained in using Linux. Here a comparison can be made with Andalusia in the Iberian peninsular where there is an integrated FLOSS program by the government, and teachers are trained and supported in Linux. Another comparison is the ongoing support programme for the voluntary sector in the UK, called ChangeUp, where there is some FLOSS support. But again the initiative is piecemeal and only in its infancy, whereas in France local authorities run a local government SourceForge-like service, ADULLACT. If a government agency makes a FLOSS software package, for example to coordinate refuse collection, the software is put in a public repository for other government agencies to make use of.

Without integrated governmental support, initiatives face an uphill struggle. At last month’s WSFII summit in London, which brought together players in the FTM, I overheard a conversion between two of the people attending, which sums up OpenMute’s position on FLOSS: ‘Why’, a woman asked, ‘are we having to build VOIP networks on a shoestring? Isn’t this what the governments or the market should be up to?’ And her friend replied, ‘Yes, you would have thought so, but no they aren’t, so it looks like it’s DIY’.

_{Image >OM user from Digital Media Studio - Bejing http://dmsbeijing.omweb.org/}

URLS:
OpenMute - http://openmute.org

SocialSource - http://www.socialsource.org.uk

ADULLACT – software mutualisation - http://www.adullact.org

Bristol Wireless - http://www.bristolwireless.net

WSFII World Summit of Free Information Infrastructures - http://wsfii.org

Simon Worthington <simon@metamute.org> is the director of OpenMute and a lapsed artist

The info-technological development of Africa is providing a critical laboratory for testing the utilitarian and egalitarian claims of the FLOSS community. The question of whether to adopt a free or proprietary route quickly expands beyond the immediate consideration of set up costs. Soenke Zehle considers how FLOSS fares in the competition to be the fittest 'tropical' technology, assesses different visions of continent-wide development, and examines FLOSS's own ambiguous economics

With a host of corporations, foundations, and organisations active in the fields of advocacy and assistance, free and open source software (FLOSS) has become a dynamic area of info-developmental cooperation. In the eminently pragmatic approach adopted by many of these efforts, the intense controversy over free vs. open source software and the extent to which advocacy should stress freedom over commercial applicability somehow seems a thing of the past. At the same time, the focus on FLOSS as an economic strategy of autonomous development within a global network capitalism rather than a post-capitalist practice of collaborative creation recalls some of the general ambivalences at the heart of software-political struggles.¹

FOSSFA

In many African countries where computer users are not necessarily owners, important choices are often made by those in charge of establishing public ICT infrastructures. While many companies and organisations have chosen to adopt FLOSS on their own, the status of governments as the largest procurers of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) means that government action is bound to stimulate industry in various ways, including the provision of FLOSS training and support. The recently founded Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA), currently headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, has therefore identified national ICT policy and procurement procedures as major advocacy targets.² For Bildad Kagai, co-founder and one of its secretaries, the licensing, localisation, and local skill building advantages of FLOSS, coupled with ‘leapfrogging’ technologies like wireless that help skip an entire generation of expensive infrastructural investments, offer an alternative to the technological dependency and resource drain associated with an exclusive reliance on mainstream proprietary software.

Given the many problems that beset the ICT sector in Africa, FLOSS advocacy is inevitably tied to political reforms in contracting, public services, and competition policy, as well as the creation of FLOSS related employment and business opportunities. Taking advantage of the organisational dynamic of WSIS and working closely with civil society organisations, corporations, and international donors, FOSSFA has created an effective advocacy coalition: Kenya’s ICT policy now gives preference to open source (and open standards) over proprietary solutions, and FOSSFA also convinced the Committee on Development Information of the Economic Commission for Africa (CODI) to adopt a policy that prioritises FLOSS.

This is no small feat, given that many African states have yet to articulate any ICT policy whatsoever, and FOSSFA is also educating policy makers across the continent about FLOSS.³ The 2004 Idlelo meeting in Capetown, co-organised by FOSSFA and the African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources Project (AVOIR) at Western Cape University, was the ‘First African Conference on the Digital Commons’.⁴ Bringing some 200 FLOSS activists and developers from across the continent together with international researchers, Idlelo emphasised the need to shift from the mere adoption of FLOSS to the local development of FLOSS applications, the use of FLOSS in education, and the development of non-proprietary open content alternatives. Hoping to be able to recruit government representatives from all 53 African states, Idlelo 2 has already been scheduled for 2006.⁵

South Africa Goes Open Source

The breakdown of Idlelo participants by country reveals the uneven geography of IT development in Africa: by far the largest contingent came from South Africa, followed by Nigeria and Kenya.⁶ South Africa’s influence in the African FLOSS movement is related to its dominance of the African IT sector at large. But there are other reasons, one of which is the impact of projects sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth.⁷ Shuttleworth, a South African celebrity entrepreneur known for his space travel – Shuttleworth was the first ‘afronaut’ – as well as his philanthropic ambition, has overseen the development of Ubuntu (an already-popular Debian-and-GNOME based linux distribution updated in regular release cycles) and his Shuttleworth Foundation has co-launched a nation wide ‘Go Open Source’ campaign.⁸

Supported by the Meraka Intitute of the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) as well as HP and Canonical, the campaign has included the production of the first ever television series on open source – broadcast on public television and available for download – and the installation of ‘Freedom Toasters’, stand alone CD/DVD burners loaded with the latest FLOSS operating systems and applications, across South Africa.⁹ In addition to working on an ‘edubuntu’ classroom version of its linux distribution, the Shuttleworth Foundation also works with South African schools to set up FLOSS-based thin client networks through its ‘tuXlabs’ initiative.¹⁰ And following the 2005 ‘Go Open Source Task Team’ conference, South Africa’s national policy on free/open source software and open content is now being turned into an ambitious action plan.¹¹

But is South Africa ‘really’ Africa? FOSSFA’s Kagai notes that ICT developments in South Africa are not representative of Africa at large, and some see in the ideas of an ‘African Renaissance’ less a new Pan-Africanism than a mere culturalisation of South Africa’s own economic and geopolitical ambition.¹² Yet it would be a mistake to associate less well off areas of the continent with a lack of interest in digital and network technologies – a point made years ago by none other than John Perry Barlow (ex-Grateful Dead and Electronic Frontier co-founder).¹³ Barlow had concluded from his own experience of country life that Africans might have preserved a pre-industrial sense of connectedness and would want to bypass the crippling effects of an individualist industrialism to embrace the digital technologies of the network society. Even after the dotcom crash, his occasionally, albeit ironically, exoticist travelogue is still worth a read, in part because much of his ‘let’s wire Africa’ enthusiasm was shared by the initial wave of international ICT task forces that were to turn the new economy experience into a fully fledged paradigm of info-development. And it encouraged Russell Southwood, a former UK management consultant, to start Balancing Act Africa, already one of the most important information services on ICT related developments across Africa, including the failures and successes of FLOSS advocacy.14

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, FLOSS has not been an easy sell. One reason, suggests Ethan Zukerman, might be the overemphasis on free beer at the expense of free speech; a reference to Richard Stallmann’s famous definition of free software.¹⁵ Zukerman, a co-founder of GeekCorps – ‘an international non-profit organisation that transfers tech skills from geeks in developed nations to geeks in emerging nations’ – and initiator of ‘BlogAfrica’, believes that many African users continue to associate ‘inexpensive’ with ‘inferior’, a legacy of technology transfer and appropriate technology projects that sometimes amounted to little more than the dumping of obsolete technology.¹⁶ And in areas where non-licensed copies of proprietary software are widely available as well as a great deal of corresponding ‘street’ expertise, comparatively expensive manuals and a lack of bandwidth for accessing online support can easily increase the total cost of ownership of non-proprietary alternatives generally assumed to be ‘free’. FLOSS advocates should stress the expandability, transparency and resulting high performance of their software instead.

While a growing number of studies make an empirically based case for FLOSS in general, less is known about the experiences of FLOSS adoption across Africa.¹⁷ One such report has been published by Bridges.org, an international NGO with offices in South Africa and the US.¹⁸ According to Bridges.org, the availability of the source code is an advantage actually rarely exploited at the computer lab level, whereas the cost of software licenses – the ‘free beer’ argument – remains a key concern, especially evident when these costs are expressed in terms of GDP share. Among the factors that lower software costs, piracy is the most important, followed by donations and so called thin-client configurations that bring back to life hardware generally considered obsolete. FLOSS, concludes the report, has become a mainstream alternative. Yet because of the level of expertise required to establish and maintain a FLOSS based computer lab, it tends to work better in large projects that have the resources to address the practical problems of migration, training, and support, in contrast to individual labs that can simply take advantage of proprietary solutions that are already in place.

Info-Political Visions

Beyond the issue of appropriate means, how do the local politics of software relate to competing visions of what ‘info-development’ is and should be about? In the larger info-political vision that frames local decisions over software and standards, questions of autonomy are central, frequently articulated in response to the hegemonic presence of corporate software and IT giants. FLOSS advocates have criticised the most recent wave of international public private partnerships in this area, for example, because they involve only the usual transnational suspects. Microsoft, HP, and Cisco are all well represented in the activities of major development agencies, advertising themselves as ‘partners in development’ to promote ICTs as the vehicles for ‘good governance’ and ‘effective service delivery’, but also to stake out their own commercial claims, crowd out grassroots or public sector alternatives, and subvert South-South cooperation.

Take SchoolNet Namibia.¹⁹ Having to work with substantially fewer resources than the Shuttleworth Foundation, SchoolNet has nevertheless set up FLOSS-based thin client networks in over a hundred schools, launched an ISP to offer subsidised internet service, and is exploring the set up of wireless access in rural areas. Once they had found that students were a lot more likely to embrace FLOSS than their teachers, and standard advocacy tools were not doing much to change that, SchoolNet launched Hai Ti (‘Listen Up!’), a comic strip that features real life FLOSS users.²⁰ Its contractual agreement with schools specifies that the teams who manage the local computer lab include students as well as teachers. Yet occasionally, SchoolNet finds that their FLOSS-LANs remain unmaintained while students use equipment donated by Microsoft and administered with support from MS certified engineers. Executive director Joris Komen is convinced that Microsoft has targeted Namibian schools specifically because SchoolNet Namibia has become an outspoken critic of the company and its philosophy.²¹

Commenting on recent agreements between Microsoft and the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Bildad Kaigai of FOSSFA agrees that such deals work to confine the software choices these agencies can make and effectively transfer wealth away from an emergent local software industry. Kagai calls on African leaders to emulate the successful development strategies of Asian countries instead.²²

Other ICT analysts note, however, that African countries will have to do so under dramatically different circumstances. Yash Tandon of SEATINI stresses that ‘most of the so-called “technology transfers” ... are essentially excuses for transnational corporations (TNCs) to take over local companies, or to carve out a share of the domestic markets.’²³ Rather than ‘stripping naked’ to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) from the North, Tandon also makes the case for the ‘creation of a home based Domestic Scientific and Technology Capacity (DSTC), including capacity to undertake relevant research and development, the actual purchase (as opposed to transfer) of appropriate technology from the open market, and a transfer of technology, preferably between South-South, only under certain conditions.’ But Tandon also notes that options exploited by the ‘Asian Tigers’ are no longer available to Africa: ‘Countries such as Korea and Taiwan, as all other now advanced economies in history, were able to do it because they disembedded the technology from its capital base (by, for example, copying intellectual property, and through reverse engineering), and by creating a ‘national’ base for capital. Some countries were able to do this during the cold war years when the West needed them to fight against the Communist threat coming from China and Vietnam. ... Since the end of the cold war, this option is no longer available. ... Now, with intellectual property rights embedded in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) under the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), scientific knowledge has become monopolised in the hands of a few thousand multinational corporations that use this knowledge to control the economies of the third world.’ For Tandon, Africa has only so many options: ‘It is in this context that Africa must develop its own DSTC, including a policy on relevant research and development. The R&D policy must be based on the production conditions in the region, the need first to produce for the domestic/regional market (only secondarily for the export market), and Africa’s location within the global value chain.’

It seems that third worldist strategies sustained by a generalised critique of neocolonialism have been replaced by the exhausting creation of advocacy networks that hold local governments just as accountable as transnational corporations.²⁴ Yet while visions of Africa’s future have sobered significantly, the emergent dynamic of South-South cooperation still echoes a tricontinentalist spirit. Brazil’s official commitment to what its minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, has refererred to as a ‘tropicalisation’ of open source has been a major push for FLOSS advocacy in Africa. One such example of a South-South technology transfer was Brazil’s support for the adoption and implementation of open source software for the management of Top Level Domain (TLD) registries in a number of African countries, a process that will eventually automate TLD registries.²⁵

An increasing ‘post-third worldist’ cooperation is visible in other international info-political fora as well. One example is the campaign for a ‘WIPO Development Agenda’ and a Treaty for Access to Knowledge, supported by a broad coalition of southern governments as well as grassroots organisations.²⁶ The World Intellectual Property Organisation is a UN agency whose current mandate is ‘the maintenance and further development of the respect for intellectual property throughout the world.’ In the eyes of its critics, this mandate limits WIPO to the role of an enforcer of Euro-American positions on intellectual property, supporting the WTO’s Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) as well as at least condoning the aggressive ‘TRIPS-Plus’ bilateralism both the US and the EU have engaged in to effectively bypass the ongoing review process of key TRIPS provisions.²⁷ The access-to-knowledge campaign puts the question of FLOSS and the struggle over open standards in a much broader context. WIPO defines creativity in relation to the prospect of proprietisation, as culture is defined as the creation of private property. The FLOSS controversy, on the other hand, is not just about reducing the cost of running a computer lab, but over the implications of its approach to ‘commons-based peer production’ (Yochai Benkler): i.e. processes of collaborative creation and an information and knowledge commons actively enlarged in opposition to the ‘second enclosure’ (James Boyle) associated with an ever expanding IPR regime.²⁸
Take the role of FLOSS developers. Rishab Ghosh, FLOSS Program Leader at the Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT), stresses that licensing costs do matter, especially when GDP is taken into account.²⁹ But another key emphasis in his studies on FLOSS in developing countries is on the skills-building in FLOSS networks. In addition to standard developer skills, open source communities address, almost by default, questions of copyright law and licensing, and introduce users to new forms of collaborative creation. Ghosh calls these ‘informal apprenticeships’ whose social cost is, of course, borne by individual users, but it is done so voluntarily, and he even considers the free sharing of developer expertise (often based on expensive degrees) a form of technology transfer. Most definitely exploited by employers who often encourage their employees to participate in FLOSS fora on the job, this voluntarist dynamic is also the basis of networks of ‘roving technology consultants’ like GeekCorps or E-Riders, as well as the collaborative practices of the FLOSS community at large.³⁰

Info-Political Pragmatism

Ghosh has been a major global FLOSS advocate, and his projects specifically address the use of FLOSS outside Europe. Yet some of his economic arguments are based on the assumption that proprietary alternatives are not locally produced. What Ghosh describes as the benefits of ‘deep access’ offered by locally developed FLOSS applications – customisation, quick bug fixing, as well as the re-use of code in other applications – is exactly how Herman Chinery-Hesse, CEO of Ghana’s successful Soft Tribe, describes his own approach.³¹ All of Soft’s software is based on ‘tropically relevant’ code, Chinery-Hesse’s reference to the full spectrum of constraints he associates with local computer use: frequent savings to disk help deal with power failures and work offline lowers costs for online access. In the case of Soft’s document management software for the Ghana Human Rights Commission, storage on remote servers addresses possible interruptions caused by a change in government. And unlike Ubuntu, Soft’s applications are optimised for the low-end hardware that dominates Ghana’s offices and cybercafés.

Soft trains the majority of Ghana’s programmers, often left to their own devices in poorly equipped computer science departments. Yet Chinery-Hesse thinks that FLOSS would impede the development of a local software industry, as developers would, he worries, be reduced to installers of pre-existing applications. His main concern, however, seems to be possible tampering with the code both by users and competitors – Chinery-Hesse fears internal mismanagement and has no interest in interoperability that could threaten Soft’s pole position in the local software market. Soft rarely releases beta versions, software does not have an autoinstall function, and bug fixes are not generally released. Evidence of Chinery-Hesse’s entrepreurial pragmatism, he has also entered into a cooperation agreement with Microsoft, hoping to take advantage of its global distribution channels to bring an add on from Ghana to desktops around the world.

For Guido Sohne, a former Soft employee and vocal FLOSS advocate, Soft’s deal with Microsoft is a form of technology transfer rather than a simple sell-out, prompted by the departure of some of its key developers without whom their previous portfolio of applications could no longer be maintained.³² Sohne left in part because Soft did not want to explore FLOSS-based alternatives to address this development impasse. Microsoft is there to stay (the new Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Centre in Ghana also entered into a deal with Microsoft), but it looks like Soft’s emergent competitors are already relying on FLOSS. So while Ghana’s developer community as a whole has not yet embraced FLOSS, this is likely to change.

In the current ‘Africanisation’ of the politics of software, the proprietary/non-proprietary divide is but one of several vectors. Perhaps this should not come as a surprise, given the hybrid dynamic of FLOSS itself. In her analyses of the cooperation between corporations and the FLOSS community, techno-feminist Yuwei Lin describes this process as ‘hybrid innovation’, marked as much by a sense of interdependence and mutuality as by unease over the irresolvable tension between commercial and community-oriented practices.³³

The dependence on corporate support illustrates the paradoxes of immaterial labour and suggests that common assumptions regarding the relationship between FLOSS and visions of a post-capitalist future be revisited. Often understood in terms of an anti-monopolistic practice, FLOSS is not, as such, anti-capitalist (GPL-founder Richard Stallman describes himself as anti-fascist instead). One of the reasons for the popularity of the FLOSS paradigm is that it appears to be able to accommodate a wide range of visions of cultural, economic, and social transformation, from cyberlibertarian views of natural capitalism to the post-autonomist vision of a coming communism, actively anticipated by way of multitudinal self-organisation. Countercultural cachet notwithstanding, the high visibility of FLOSS as a mainstream alternative to proprietary software is due in large part to the support from corporations like IBM or Sun Microsystems, and the commitment to openness reverberates with an info-capitalism attempting to reinvent itself around concepts of trust and transparency.

And while the controversies over software licenses are so intense because their clauses redefine what property means in the network society, not all of FLOSS is geared toward an enlargement of the information commons. Following the popularity of user-defined license provisions like Creative Commons, Sun Microsystems has announced its own ‘Open Media Commons’ initiative to develop FLOSS based digital rights management tools.³⁴ FLOSS, already adopted by cost cutting governments across the world, is also easily aligned with state power – South Africa’s FLOSS and open content strategy includes, after all, the migration to FLOSS of its prison management systems.³⁵ This makes one-size-fits-all approaches to the politics of software almost impossible, even more so in the context of African ICT controversies.

Yet what is certain is that an African info-politics is already emerging along key faultlines of network-economical conflict, challenging images of an Africa forever mired in ‘tribal rampages’ and natural disasters. And while it is too soon to say what transformative impact FLOSS efforts may already have had, examples like FOSSFA or SchoolNet show that FLOSS is not reducible to an imperial voluntarism out of sync with the ‘real’ Africa. FLOSS‘s collaborative ethic is not a post-materialist luxury limited to those on the sunny side of the digital divide. Instead, the Africanisation of FLOSS in terms of an ‘ubuntu’ philosophy of sharing may soon connect to other collective efforts in a larger Pan-African vision of renewal. This project driven mainly from below is rarely included in the sovereign perspective of afro-pessimist prophecies accompanying the current wave of imperial nostalgia.³⁶ In his documentary afro@digital, Congolese director Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda retrieves the story of the Ishango Bone, the oldest known table of prime numbers, to suggest that mathematics, and by implication the network society as a whole, needs to be given a new, Afrocentric genealogy. FLOSS advocacy may not have to go that far. Yet perhaps a discussion of software politics in Africa should not begin with the question of software, but with the contradictory images of Africa that linger in the collective post-colonial imagination.

FOOTNOTES

¹ For an account of free software vs open source software in terms of a struggle over discursive hegemony, see David  Berry, ‘The Contestation of Code: A preliminary investigation into the discourse of  the free/libre and open source movements’, Critical Discourse Studies 1.1 (April 2004),  65–89,  http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/berry1.pdf

² http://FOSSFA.net

³ Bildad Kagai and Nicolas Kimolo, ‘FOSSFA in Africa: Opening the Door to State ICT Development Agendas – A Kenya Case Study’, SSRC The Politics of Open Source Adoption (2005), http://www.ssrc.org/wiki/POSA; CODI, ‘Resolutions of the Fourth Meeting of the Committee on Development Information (CODI-IV)’, UNECA Commission on Development Information (23-28 April 2005), http://www.uneca.org/codi/codi4/codi_iv_report.pdf. See the country policy tables at: http://www.bridges.org/FLOSS/index.html

⁴ http://avoir.uwc.ac.za/

⁵ http://www.FOSSFA.net/idlelo2

⁶ Derek Keats, ‘Idlelo: First African Conference on the Digital Commons’, Final Report to Department of Science & Technology South Africa (2004), http://www.catia.ws/Documents/Indexpage/IdleloFinalReport.pdf

⁷ http://www.markshuttleworth.com

⁸ http://www.ubuntulinux.org, http://www.go-opensource.org/

⁹ http://www.freedomtoaster.org/, http://www.go-opensource.org/go_open

¹⁰ http://www.edubuntu.org/, http://www.tuxlab.org.za/
A thin client is a computer (client) in client-server architecture networks which have very few resources, so it has to depend primarily on the central server for processing activities. A thin client network centralises maintenance tasks on a (remote) server

¹¹ http://wiki.go-opensource.org/taskforce

¹² For a middle of the road assessment of the African Renaissance, see Elias K. Bongmba, ‘Reflections on Thabo Mbeki’s African Renaissance’, Journal of Southern African Studies 30.2 (June 2004). For more critical views, see Neil Lazarus, ‘The South African Ideology: The Myth of Exceptionalism, the Idea of Renaissance,’ South Atlantic Quarterly 103.4 (Fall 2004), 607-28, and Neville Alexander, ‘South Africa – Example or Illusion?’ An Ordinary Country: Issues in the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy in South Africa, New York: Berghahn Books, 2003, 137-73, 188-90

¹³ John Perry Barlow, ‘Africa Rising,’ Wired 6.01 (1998) http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.01/barlow_pr.html

¹⁴ http://www.balancingact-africa.com/

¹⁵ Ethan Zukerman, ‘Free Beer Doesn’t Sell’, Linux Journal 111 (July 2003) http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6785

¹⁶ http://www.geekcorps.org/, http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/

¹⁷ David Wheeler, ‘Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS, FLOSS, or FLOSS)? Look at the Numbers!’, (May 2005) http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html

¹⁸ Bridges.org, ‘Comparison study of Free/Open Source and Proprietary Software in an African context: implementation and policy-making to optimise community access to ICT’ (May 2005) http://www.bridges.org/software_comparison/index.html

¹⁹ http://www.schoolnet.na/

²⁰ http://www.schoolnet.na/haiti

²¹ http://tatejoris.blogspot.com

²² Bildad Kagai, ‘FOSSFA responds to Microsoft-UNDP Deal’ (Feb 2004), http://FOSSFA.net

²³ Yash Tandon, ‘An Alternative View on Technology’, SEATINI (Sept 2004), http://www.seatini.org/publications/factsheets/technology.htm

²⁴ Thandika Mkandawire, ‘Good Governance: The Itinerary of an Idea’, D + C Development and Cooperation 31.10 (01 Oct 2004) http://www.inwent.org/E+Z/content/archive-eng/10-2004/tribune_art1.html

²⁵ Rebecca Wanjiku, ‘Brazil opens its arms to Africa’, Highway Africa News Agency (05 April 2005) http://www.highwayafrica.ru.ac.za/hana/textviewer.asp?item_id=339

²⁶ http://www.cptech.org/a2k/, http://www.eff.org/IP/WIPO/dev_agenda/,  http://www.access2knowledge.org/cs/

²⁷ Peter Drahos and John Brathwaite, ‘Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? Political Organising Behind TRIPS’, Corner House Briefings (Sept 2004), http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/briefing/32trips.pdf, also see http://www.bilaterals.org/

²⁸ Yochai Benkler, ‘Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm’ (2002) http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html; James Boyle, ‘A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism For the Net?’ (1997) http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/intprop.htm

²⁹ Rishab Ghosh, ‘Free/Libre/Open Source Software for developing countries: skills, employment and costs’, 2nd National Congress on Software Libre, Buenos Aires, Argentina (07 June 2005), http://www.flossproject.org/papers.htm

³⁰ http://www.eriders.net

³¹ G. Pascal Zachary, ‘The African Hacker,’ IEEE Spectrum Online (Aug 2005), http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/aug05/0805ahac.html

³² My assessment of Soft is based on an email exchange with Guido Sohne (Sept 2005). Also see http://sohne.net.

³³ Yuwei Lin, ‘Hybrid Innovation: How Does the Collaboration Between the FLOSS Community and Corporations Happen?’ Knowledge, Technology and Policy 18.2 (Summer 2005), http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/lin4_hybrid.pdf

³⁴ http://www.openmediacommons.org/. As the history of commons-based resource management systems shows, ‘commons’ doesn’t necessarily imply the free-for-all often associated with it, and it is not necessarily obvious – a point made frequently by advocates of indigenous and traditional knowledge databases, for example – that ‘commons’ and ‘access restrictions’ are mutually exclusive; what emerges instead are ‘hybridised’ commons that take the information needs of specific communities into account.

³⁵ http://wiki.go-opensource.org/taskforce/CorrectProj

³⁶ Martin Meredith, The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, London: Free Press, 2005; Seumas Milne, ‘Britain: imperial nostalgia’, Le Monde Diplomatique (May 2005). Also see Chris Landsberg and Shaun Mckay, ‘Engaging the new Pan-Africanism’, Centre for Policy Studies (Sept 2005) http://www.sarpn.org.za/documents/d0001537/CSO-Guide_pan-africanism_2005.pdf

Soenke Zehle <s.zehle AT kein.org> teaches transcultural media studies at Saarland University, Germany

Immaterial Labour is seen by (post)Marxists and capitalists alike as the motor of the new economy. Steve Wright recovers Marx's theory of value from critics such as Antonio Negri to ask whether it is as 'immeasurably' productive as is claimed?

A priest once came across a Zen master and, seeking
to embarrass him, challenged him as follows: ‘Using neither sound nor silence, can you show me what is reality?’
The Zen master punched him in the face.¹

Continued assertions that, today, we live in a knowledge economy or society raise many questions for reflection. In the next few pages, I want to discuss some aspects of these assertions, especially as they relate to the notion of immaterial labour. This term has developed within the camp of thought that is commonly labelled ‘postworkerist’, of which the best known exponent is undoubtedly Antonio Negri. While its roots lie in that branch of postwar Italian Marxism known as operaismo (workerism), this milieu has rethought and reworked many of the precepts developed during the Italian New Left’s heyday of 1968-78. If anything, it was the very defeat of the social subjects with which operaismo had identified – first and foremost, the so-called ‘mass worker’ engaged in the production of consumer durables through repetitive, ‘semi-skilled labour’ – that led Negri and others to insist that we are embarked upon a new age beyond modernity.²

According to this view of the world, a quite different kind of labour is currently either hegemonic amongst those with nothing to sell but their ability to work – or, at the very least, is well on the way towards acquiring such hegemony. Secondly, capital’s growing dependence upon this different – immaterial – labour has serious implications for the process of self-expanding abstract labour (value) that defines capital as a social relation. While Marx had held that the ‘socially-necessary labour-time’ associated with their production provided the means by which capital could measure the value of commodities (and so the mass of surplus value that it hoped to realise with their sale), Negri, on the other hand, is of the opinion that in a time of increasingly complex and skilled labour, and of a working day that more and more blurs the boundaries with (and ultimately colonises) the rest of our waking hours, value can no longer be calculated. As he put it a decade ago, in such circumstances the exploitation of labour still continues, but ‘outside any economic measure: its economic reality is fixed exclusively in political terms.’³

This is pretty esoteric stuff, particularly the arguments over the measurability (or otherwise) of value. Should we care one way or the other? What I hope to show below is that for all their apparent obscurity, these debates matter. That is because they raise questions as to how we understand our immediate context, including how we interpret the possibilities latent within contemporary class composition. Is one sector of class composition likely to set the pace and tone in struggles against capital, or should we look instead towards the emergence of ‘strange loops … odd circuits and strange connections between and among various class sectors’ (as Midnight Notes once suggested) as a necessary condition for moving beyond ‘the present state of things’?

Unpacking immaterial labour

Maurizio Lazzarato’s discussion of ‘Immaterial Labour’ was perhaps the first extended treatment of the topic to appear in English. Part of an important anthology of Italian texts published in the mid ‘90s, Lazzarato’s work defined the term immaterial labour as ‘labour that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity.’⁴ If the ‘classic’ forms of this labour were represented in fields like ‘audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, the production of software, photography, cultural activities, and so forth’, those who perform such work commonly found themselves in highly casualised, precarious and exploited circumstances, as part of what, more recently and in certain Western European radical circles, has come to be called the ‘precariat’.⁵

The Taylorist approach to production that confronted the mass worker had decreed that ‘you are not paid to think’. With immaterial labour, Lazzarato argued, management’s project was different. In fact, it was even more totalitarian than the earlier rigid division between mental and manual labour (ideas and execution), because capitalism seeks to involve even the worker’s personality within the production of value.⁶

At the same time this managerial approach carried real risks for capital, Lazzarato believed, since capital’s very existence was placed in the hands of a labour force called upon to exercise its creativity through collective endeavours. And unlike a century ago, when a layer of skilled workers likewise stood at the centre of key industries, yet largely cut off from the unorganised ‘masses’, today ‘immaterial labour’ could not be understood as the distinctive attribute of one stratum within the workforce. Instead, skilled labour is present (even if only in latent form) amongst broad sectors of the labour market, starting with the young.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire – a book that has come to stand (rightly or wrongly) as the centrepiece of postworkerist thought – built upon and modified Lazzarato’s work. Accepting the premise that immaterial labour was now central to capital’s survival (and by extension, to projects that aimed at its extinction), Hardt and Negri identified three segments of immaterial labour:

a) the reshaped instances of industrial production which had embraced communication as their lifeblood;
b) the ‘symbolic analysis and problem solving’ undertaken by knowledge workers;
c) the affective labour found above all within the service sector.⁷

These experiences, it was conceded, could be quite disparate: knowledge workers, for example, were divided between high-end practitioners with considerable control over their working conditions, while others engaged in ‘low-value and low-skill jobs of routine symbol manipulation’.⁸ Nonetheless a common thread did exist between the three elements. As instances of service work, none of them produced a ‘material or durable good’. Moreover, since the output was physically intangible as a discrete object, so the labour that produced it could be designated as ‘immaterial’.⁹

How can we make sense of such arguments? Doug Henwood, who praised Empire for the verve and optimism of its vision, was nonetheless moved to add:

Hardt and Negri are often uncritical and credulous in the face of orthodox propaganda about globalization and immateriality … They assert that immaterial labour – service work, basically – now prevails over the old-fashioned material kind, but they don’t cite any statistics: you’d never expect that far more Americans are truck drivers than are computer professionals. Nor would you have much of an inkling that three billion of us, half the earth’s population, live in the rural Third World, where the major occupation remains tilling the soil.¹⁰

Nick Dyer-Witheford has likewise registered a number of concerns with Hardt and Negri’s account of class composition.¹¹ To his mind, Empire glosses over the tensions between the three class fragments it identifies, while ultimately reading immaterial labour only through the lenses of its high-end manifestations. And was all of this really as new as Hardt and Negri intimated? It’s not as if ‘affective labour’, for instance, was anything but fundamental to social reproduction in the past, even if it did go unnoticed – because of its largely gendered composition perhaps – in many social analyses.

Another issue concerns Empire’s insistence that ‘the cooperative aspect of immaterial labour is not imposed or organised from the outside’.¹² Again, perhaps this is true for some work at the high-end. But does the obligation to ask ‘Do you want fries with that?’ really represent a break with Fordist work regimes? Or might many of the McJobs that are prevalent in the lower depths of so-called immaterial production be better characterised as ‘the Taylorised, deskilled descendants of earlier forms of office’ and other service work?¹³

More recently, Hardt and Negri have attempted to address some of their critics in Multitude, the 2004 sequel to Empire. The first thing to note here is that while immaterial labour remains a central pivot within the book’s arguments, it is presented in a rather more cautious and qualified form than before. Indeed, Hardt and Negri are at pains to state that:

a) ‘When we claim that immaterial labour is tending towards the hegemonic position we are not saying that most of the workers in the world today are producing primarily immaterial goods’;
b) ‘The labour involved in all immaterial production, we should emphasise, remains material – it involves our bodies and brains as all labour does. What is immaterial is its product.’¹⁴

Therefore, much like the ascendance of the multitude itself, here the hegemony of immaterial labour as the reference point, or even vanguard, for ‘most of the workers in the world today’ is flagged as a tendency, albeit one that is inexorable. Towards the end of Multitude’s discussion of immaterial labour, Hardt and Negri insist upon what they call a ‘reality check’ – ‘what evidence do we have to substantiate our claim of a hegemony of immaterial labour?’¹⁵ It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for, and unfortunately the half a page of discussion they proffer is something of a damp squib: an allusion to US Bureau of Statistics figures which indicate that service work is on the rise; the relocation of industrial production ‘to subordinate parts of the world’, said to signal the privileging of immaterial production at the heart of the Empire; the rising importance of ‘immaterial forms of property’; and, finally, the spread of network forms of organisation particular to immaterial labour.¹⁶ Call me old-fashioned, but something more than this is needed in a book of 400 plus pages dedicated to understanding their claims regarding latest manifestation of the proletariat as a revolutionary subject…

^{Image > Anja Kirschner}

Their reference to the growth in service sector activity is interesting for a number of reasons. Huws argues that the unrelenting rise in service work within the West might be cast in a different light if the domestic employment so common 100 years ago was factored into the equation.¹⁷ Writing a decade earlier, Sergio Bologna suggested that certain forms of work only came to be designated as ‘services’ within national statistics after they had been outsourced; previously, when they had been performed ‘in house’, they had counted as ‘manufacturing’.¹⁸ Neither author is seeking to deny that important shifts have occurred within the global economy, starting with countries like Britain, Australia, Canada and the United States. Yet they urge caution in how we interpret the changes, and care in the categories used to explain them. Bologna – a one-time collaborator with Negri in a variety of political projects back in the ’60s and ’70s – is particularly caustic about the notion of immaterial labour, labelling it a ‘myth’ that more than anything else obscures the lengthening of the working day.¹⁹

Goodbye to value as measure?

As stated earlier, one of the distinguishing features of postworkerism is the rejection of Marx’s so-called ‘law of value’. George Caffentzis reminds us that Marx himself rarely spoke of such a law, but there is also no doubt of his opinion that, under the rule of capital, the amount of labour time socially necessary to produce commodities ultimately determined their value.²⁰ In breaking with Marx in this regard, postworkerists draw some of their inspiration instead from a passage in the Grundrisse known as the ‘Fragment on Machines’. This envisages a situation, in line with capital’s perennial attempt to free itself from dependence upon labour, where knowledge has become the lifeblood of fixed capital, and the direct input of labour to production is merely incidental. In these circumstances, Marx argues, capital effectively cuts the ground from under its own feet, for ‘As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value’.²¹

Negri, among others, has insisted for many years, and in a variety of ways, that capital has now reached this stage. Therefore, nothing but sheer domination keeps its rule in place: ‘the logic of capital is no longer functional to development, but is simply command for its own reproduction’.²² In fact a range of social commentators have evoked the ‘Fragment on Machines’ in recent times – apart from anything else, it has held a certain popularity amongst those (like reactionary futurologist Jeremy Rifkin) who tell us that we live in an increasingly work-free society. It’s a pity, then, that few of these writers follow the logic of Marx’s argument in the Grundrisse to its conclusions. For while he indicates that capital does indeed seek ‘to reduce labour time to a minimum’, Marx also reminds us that capital is itself nothing other than accumulated labour time (abstract labour as value).²³ In other words, capital is obliged by its very nature, and for as long as we are stuck with it, to pose ‘labour time … as sole measure and source of wealth.’

In its efforts to escape from labour, capital attempts a number of things that, each in their own way, fuel arguments that make labour time appear as irrelevant as the measure of capital’s development. Looked at more carefully, however, each can be seen in a somewhat different light. To begin with, capital tries as much as possible to externalise its labour costs: to take a banal example (although not so banal if you are a former bank employee), by encouraging online and teller machine banking and discouraging over-the-counter customer service. As for our own work regimes, many of us find ourselves bringing more and more work home (or on the train, or in the car). More and more of us also seem to be on stand-by, accessible through the net or by phone. Added together, such strategies (which, to add to the messiness of it all, may well intersect with our own individual aspirations for greater flexibility) go a long way to help explain that blurring of the line between the ‘work’ and ‘non work’ components of our day that Negri decries. On the other hand, they also cast that boundary in light other than that of the collapse of labour time as the measure of value, one in which – precisely because the quantity of labour time is crucial to capital’s existence – as much labour as possible comes to be performed in its unpaid form.

Secondly, in seeking to decrease labour costs within individual organisations, capital also reshapes the process through which profits are distributed on a sectoral and global scale. In a number of essays over the past 15 years, George Caffentzis has outlined the idea, first elaborated at some length in the third volume of Marx’s Capital, that average rates of profit suck surplus value from labour-intensive sectors towards those with much greater investment in fixed capital:

In order for there to be an average rate of profit throughout the capitalist system, branches of industry that employ very little labour but a lot of machinery must be able to have the right to call on the pool of value that high-labour, low-tech branches create. If there were no such branches or no such right, then the average rate of profit would be so low in the high-tech, low-labour industries that all investment would stop and the system would terminate. Consequently, ‘new enclosures’ in the countryside must accompany the rise of ‘automatic processes’ in industry, the computer requires the sweat shop, and the cyborg’s existence is premised on the slave.²⁴

In this instance, if there appears to be no immediate correlation between the value of an individual commodity and the profit that it returns in the market, the answer may well be that there is none: the puzzle can only be solved by examining the sector as a whole, in a sweep that reaches far beyond the horizons of immaterial labour. Here too, it’s a matter of which parameters we choose to frame our enquiry.

Thirdly, and following on from above, the division of labour in many organisations, industries and firms has reached the point where it is difficult – and probably pointless – to determine the contribution of an individual employee to the mass of commodities that they help to produce.²⁵ Again, this can foster the sense that the labour time involved in producing such commodities (whether tangible or not) is irrelevant to the value they contain. Marx, for his part, argued that the central question in making sense of all this was one of perspective:

If we consider the aggregate worker, i.e. if we take all the members comprising the workshop together, then we see that their combined activity results materially in an aggregate product which is at the same time a quantity of goods. And here it is quite immaterial whether the job of a particular worker, who is merely a limb of this aggregate worker, is at a greater or smaller distance from the actual manual labour.²⁶

In this regard, Ursula Huws’ critique of notions of ‘the weightless economy’ deserves careful attention. Like Doug Henwood in his fierce deconstruction of the ‘new economy’,²⁷ Huws draws our attention back not only to the massive infrastructure that underpins ‘the knowledge economy’, but also to ‘the fact that real people with real bodies have contributed real time to the development of these “weightless” commodities.’²⁸ As for determining the contribution of human labour within the production of immaterial products, Huws argues, that while this might ‘be difficult to model, that ‘does not render the task impossible’. Or, in David Harvie’s words, ‘every day the personifications of capital – whether private or state – make judgements regarding value and its measure’ in their efforts ‘to reinforc[e] the connection between value and work’; He adds:

Hardt and Negri may believe in the ‘impossibility of power’s calculating and ordering production at a global level’, but ‘power’ hasn’t stopped trying and the ‘impossibility’ of its project derives directly from our own struggles against the reduction of life to measure.²⁹

Other leads?

Not long ago, Dr Woo pointed me to a presentation by Brian Holmes entitled ‘Continental Drift Or, The Other Side of Neoliberal Globalisation’.³⁰ In large part, his talk is a reflection upon the arguments in Hardt and Negri’s Empire, taking advantage of the hindsight provided by five years of events since the book’s publication. For Holmes, many of the arguments advanced in Empire were important for challenging commonplace assumptions about how to make sense of the ‘big picture’ of global power relations, forcing a reconsideration of terms such as globalisation and imperialism. But if the book helped in clearing away certain misconceptions, it has not been nearly so successful in supplanting them with more adequate ways of seeing.

‘Continental Drift’ addresses a host of issues, but Holmes makes three points which have great relevance for our current discussion. First, a privileged focus upon ‘immaterial labour’ is increasingly unsatisfactory for efforts to understand what is happening within contemporary class composition. Second, global events since the publication of Empire cast doubt upon the usefulness of seeing capital’s domination as a smooth space that lacks centre(s). And third, more attention has to be paid to the reasons why the world of finance has become such a crucial aspect of capital’s rule in our time. Regarding the first point, Holmes offers some similar criticisms to those made by Dyer-Witheford. If the concept of immaterial labour is important for analysing certain kinds of work ‘in the so-called tertiary or service sectors of the developed economies’, talk of its hegemony can obscure not only ‘the global division of labour’ and thus ‘the precise conditions under which people work and reproduce themselves’, but also how ‘they conceive their subordination and their possible agency, or their desires for change.’ As for the second point, Holmes argues that global capitalism is better understood through the analysis of ‘regional blocs’ such as the European Union or the increasing engagement between China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Finally, he believes that a far better understanding is needed of the role of money – and of finance above all – in capital’s efforts to maintain its control at both the international and individual level (on this score, see also Loren Goldner’s writings on fictitious capital).³¹

The richest explorations of regional blocs that I have encountered are those developed by ‘world systems’ analysts such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver. Interestingly enough, their efforts to explain the emergence of a new cycle of global accumulation with its epicentre in Asia is intimately bound up with their attempt to understand why the expansion of money as capital has come so much to the fore over the past thirty years or so. For them, the predominance of financial expansion is symptomatic of a necessary phase in the cycle of accumulation when, as doubts mount concerning the profitability to be found within production, industries are relocated, unemployed capital and labour pile up, and ‘a sharp acceleration of economic polarisation [occurs] both globally and within states’.³² In recent times, Arrighi (who also penned one of the more considered reviews of Empire) has devoted much of his efforts to understanding the waning fortunes of the US state and capital within this process,³³ while Silver has concentrated upon the prospects facing contemporary labour in an age of capital flight.³⁴ The work of these authors (much of which is on the net) is well worth a look: in part for the challenges they offer to a number of radical orthodoxies, but also for the depth of analysis that they bring to their account of the conflicts between and within the forces of labour and capital today.

There is still a great deal to unravel in the issues touched upon here. All the same, there are some useful leads as to where to go next. For example, the current centrality of money as capital, with all the peculiarities that it entails, may offer another reason why it might appear that socially necessary labour time no longer has any bearing upon capital’s existence as value in search of greater value. Speculative ventures – of which the past decade has been rife – seem to make money out of thin air. But in actuality, they do nothing to increase the total pool of value generated by capital. At best, they redistribute what already exists. More uncertainly, they seek to sidestep the sphere of production and instead make money ‘from betting on the future exploitation of labour’.³⁵ In the meantime, debt continues to balloon, from the micro scale of individual and family credit cards, to the macro level of public sector budgets and current account deficits. Whatever the ingenious ways through which the burden of such debt is redistributed, the terms of the wager cannot be forestalled forever. When it is finally called in, things will become very interesting indeed. If nothing else, we may then find out at last whether, as Madonna sang:

The boy with the cold hard cash
Is always Mister Right, ’cause we are
Living in a material world.

FOOTNOTES

¹ Thanks to Hobo for telling me this story. Thanks too to Angela Mitropoulos and Nate Holdren for their helpful suggestions with this piece. All mistakes my own, etc.

² For the best introduction to postworkerism see the Generation Online website http://www.generation-online.org

³ Negri, A. (1994) ‘Oltre la legge di valore’, DeriveApprodi 5-6, Winter

⁴ Lazzarato, M. (1996) ‘Immaterial Labour’, in P. Virno & M. Hardt (eds.) Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p.133

⁵ Ibid, p.137

⁶ Ibid, p.136

⁷ Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2000) Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p.30

⁸ Ibid, p.292

⁹ Ibid, p.290

¹⁰ Henwood, D. (2003) After the New Economy. New York: New Press, pp.184-5

¹¹ Dyer-Witheford, N. (2005) ‘Cyber-Negri: General Intellect and Immaterial Labour’, in Murphy, T. & Mustapha, A. (eds.) Resistance in Practice: The Philosophy of Antonio Negri. London: Pluto Press, pp.151-55

¹² Hardt & Negri (2000), op. cit., p294

¹³ Huws, U. (2003) The Making of a Cybertariat. New York: Monthly Review Press, p.138

¹⁴ Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, p.109

¹⁵ Ibid, p.114

¹⁶ Ibid, p.115

¹⁷ Huws, op. cit, p.130

¹⁸ Bologna, S. (1992) ‘Problematiche del lavoro autonomo in Italia (I)’, Altreragioni 1, June, pp.20-1

¹⁹ Ibid, pp.22-4

²⁰ Caffentzis, G. (2005) ‘Immeasurable Value?: An Essay on Marx’s Legacy’, The Commoner 10, Spring/Summer

²¹ Marx, K. (1973) Grundrisse. Hardmondsworth: Penguin, p.705

²² Negri, (1994), op. cit., 28

²³ Marx, op. cit., 706

²⁴ Caffentzis, G. (1997) ‘Why Machines Cannot Create Value or, Marx’s Theory of Machines’, in J. Davis, T. Hirschl & M. Stack (eds.) Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution. London: Verso

²⁵ Harvie, D. (2005) ‘All Labour is Productive and Unproductive’, The Commoner 10, Spring/Summer

²⁶ Marx, K. (1976) ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’, now in Capital Vol. I. Hardmondsworth: Penguin, quoted in H. Cleaver, H. Cleaver (2001) Reading Capital Politically. Second Edition. Antithesis

²⁷ Henwood, op. cit.

²⁸ Huws, op. cit., pp.142-3

²⁹ Harvie, op. cit., pp.151-154

³⁰ Holmes, B. (2005) ‘Continental Drift Or, The Other Side of Neoliberal Globalization’, http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/09/27/131214&mode=nocomment&tid=90

³¹ Goldner, L. (2005) ‘China In the Contemporary World Dynamic of Accumulation and Class Struggle’, http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/china.html, and
L. Goldner (2005) ‘Fictitious Capital and the Transition out of Capitalism’, http://home.earthlink.net/%7Elrgoldner/program.html

³² Wallerstein, I. (2003) The Decline of American Power. New York: The New Press, p.275

³³ Arrighi, G. (2005a) ‘Hegemony Unravelling – 1’, New Left Review 32, March-April, and, Arrighi, G. (2005b) ‘Hegemony Unravelling – 2’, New Left Review 33, May-June

³⁴ Silver, B. (2002) Forces of Labour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

³⁵ Bonefeld, W. & Holloway, J. (1995) ‘Conclusion: Money and Class Struggle’, in Bonefeld, W. & Holloway, J. (eds.) Global Capital, National State, and the Politics of Money. New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp.213-4


Steve Wright <pmargin@optusnet.com.au> works at Monash University and is the author of Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, London: Pluto Press

Creative Commons and the Free Software Movement

Just how many licences do we need to preserve freedom? Benjamin Mako Hill uses his experience in the development of Free Software to address the weakness of Creative Commons licences

Creative Commons (CC) advocates such as Lawrence Lessig have become fixtures on panels discussing Free Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS). Frequently they are seen as representatives of the growing movement to translate the principles of free software to the world beyond code. Creative Commons advocates, directors, and supporters increasingly describe the project as an attempt to apply the principles of free software, appropriately adapted, to less technical forms of creative expression like music, writing, and the visual arts.

Comparisons between CC and free software are hardly coincidental. The CC website proudly describes the inspiration for the project as, in part, ‘the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GNU GPL).’ Many of the minds behind CC (Lawrence Lessig, James Boyle, and others) made important contributions to legal and philosophical discussions of the free software movement before starting CC.

However, while the GNU GPL is FLOSS’s most famous legal artifact, free software existed as a concept, as a movement, as code, and as licences before the GPL. As the GPL is revised and replaced, free software remains unchanged.¹ There are many free software licences and most look little like the GPL.

Free software’s fundamental document is Richard Stallman’s Free Software Definitions (FSD).² At its core, the FSD lists four freedoms:

The freedom to run the program, for any purpose;
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs;
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour;
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

When a piece of software’s licence provides these freedoms, the software is considered free software. When a piece of software’s licence does not, it is not free. A requirement for attribution does not violate the four freedoms; hence, a licence requiring attribution can be free. A non-commercial use clause restricts the first freedom; as a result, licences barring commercial use are considered non-free, for better or for worse. After these fundamental freedoms are satisfied, FLOSS is licence agnostic.

Free software advocates have been able to use the free software definition as the rallying point for a powerful social movement. Free software, like the concept of freedom in any freedom movement, is something that one can demand, something that one can protest for, and something that one can work toward. Working toward these goals, freeand open source software movements have created the GNU/Linux operating system and billions of lines of freely available computer code.

For the CC founders and many of CC’s advocates, FLOSS’s success is a source of inspiration. However, despite CC’s stated desire to learn from and build upon the example of the free software movement, CC sets no defined limits and promises no freedoms, no rights, and no fixed qualities. Free software’s success is built upon an ethical position. CC sets no such standard.

At the core of most CC licences are a hodge-podge of pick-and-choose (and often incompatible) features that can include prohibitions on commercial use, the requirement to release and redistribute derivative works freely, the requirement to retain attribution, and a blanket ban on derivative versions altogether.  The only quality common to all of these licences was that verbatim copies would always be distributable non-commercially. In other words, while works under CC licences may be licenced under any number of terms, all works allowed the non-commercial copying of unmodified versions without permission.

A new licence, the CC ‘Sampling licence’ or ‘Recombo’ licence – created in association with the band Negativland and the Brazilian music legend (and Minister of Culture) Gilberto Gil – prohibits even verbatim distribution while allowing for commercial and non-commercial sampling. Another new licence allows for a broad range of freedoms – but only for those living in the developing world.

It is important to note that every CC licence is aimed at a particular problem and addresses a particular need.  A blanket restriction on commercial use and derivative works opens the door to many of the most widespread models for financial sustainability in the art and culture industries today. The risks of lawsuits over sampling and the onerous process of requesting permission has a real silencing effect that the Recombo licence is intended to address. The Developing Nations licence addresses a real global imbalance in the way international IP is structured. Each new licence exists for a good reason. But this is not the model that has made free software successful.

Creative Commons licences are designed to give artists choice. Lessig personally describes how Creative Commons, ‘gives creators the freedom to choose how their works are used.’  This is not freedom in the sense that the term is used in free software.
Until relatively recently, CC stood, and could act as a nexus, for a social movement focused on the requirement for verbatim non-commercial use of artistic works. A low bar in the minds of some, especially in comparison to free software, but a de facto bar nonetheless. The new Recombo and Developing Nations licences remove even that. While free software has succeeded by building a social movement for the idea of freedom, CC refuses to set any such limit.

Instead, CC’s inability to represent even a minimal attachment to any defined spirit of sharing is apparent each time someone approaches the CC board with a real problem and an interest in distributing their work under a licence that is more restrictive than the most restrictive CC licence but also less restrictive than the status quo.

Had CC followed a model similar to that of free software, they would have drawn a line in the sand. ‘This is a Commons film. That film is not.’ It would have sent a clear message that making a CC document is more difficult than convincing the CC board to add another licence to the CC website. By drawing this line, CC would be taking the risk that not as many individuals would be able or willing to use CC licences and that some injustices and imbalances might not be addressed by their project. Non-participation, even en masse, was a risk Richard Stallman was willing to take in the pursuit of more freedom for software. Ultimately, users of the GNU/Linux operating system created by the social movement he initiated have his stubbornness to thank for the consistent level of software freedom they enjoy.

^{Image > Ben Seymour}

To be sure, many programmers and software companies are uncomfortable with the freedoms required by the FSD. Programmers are welcome to release applications under a licence that prohibits terrorists, fascists, or pacifists from using their software but their software won’t be free. There are very good and thoughtfully considered reasons for each freedom in the FSD; there may also be very good and thoughtfully considered reasons for choosing not to use them. free software draws a line and leaves the final judgment calls up to the developers applying the licences and the users using the software.

Not every programmer has to write free software. Not every programmer does.  But if coders want to call their project ‘free software’ or ‘open source,’ they must pass the bar set in the FSD and OSD. If a programmer wants their software included in Debian, listed in the free software Directory, or supported by SourceForge, free software’s core freedoms must exist for their users. As a result, few coders write ‘almost free’ software today while, proportionately, many more did two decades ago. With Creative Commons there is no bar and no essential freedom. As a social movement, CC has failed to take positions and set goals in the ways that made free software successful.

By no means is CC a bad thing – this article is distributed under a CC licence. Every CC licence clearly describes a right that cannot be taken for granted in contemporary copyright. With licences that declare an author’s intentions, the need for lawyers and permission-asking is significantly minimized. CC licences are easy to understand and easy to apply. But by failing to take any firm ethical position and draw any line in the sand, CC is a missed opportunity.

Because CC has the support of influential intellectuals, and commands high profile institutional support, the creators of CC have had an opportunity to define a movement for the production of content in what they think is a better, more ‘free’, more ‘open’, or more ‘common’ manner. They have not done so.

When asked at the World Summit on the Information Society about non-commercial use clauses, Lessig said that he thought they were overused and frequently a bad idea. For whatever reasons, three-quarters of CC-licenced works prohibit commercial use.³ Lessig provided licences and he hoped most creators’ conservatism and fears would not get the better of them. Apparently, they did; artistic works under these licences are less accessible to a large number of creators.

Perhaps a literary or musical work can be free and open and restrict commercial use. Perhaps it can’t. Inspired by the freeand open source software movement, one of the finest collections of legal and philosophical minds critical of contemporary intellectual property policy had the opportunity, foresight, and institutional and grassroots support to weigh in on a set of important issues – on either side. They did not. To this day, no widely discussed – much less widely accepted – definition of free, open, or common content exists.

This article is not an attempt to criticise the presence of non-commercial use clauses, or any of the other clauses, in Creative Commons’ licences. Instead it is a criticism of the fact that there are no defined criteria by which any clauses can be categorically blocked. It is a criticism of the fact that there is no base level of freedom that every Creative Commons licence must provide. Creative Commons’ website reads:

Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control – a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which ‘all rights reserved’ (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy – a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation – once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally – have become endangered species.

CC’s goal of escaping a world of ‘all rights reserved’ is laudable, but they fail to describe what it will be replaced by except to say it will be better. While something slightly better is surely desirable, it might also be too little. Balance, compromise and moderation are certainly admirable and worthwhile goals; but undefined, unlimited, and unchecked, conservatism risks reducing CC’s concept of balance toward little more than ‘slightly better than the status quo.’

While CC’s licences are novel and effective tools, CC’s ‘freedom of choice’ is hardly new; it forms the foundation upon which copyright and all copyright licensing schemes work. It bears little resemblance, in scope, extent, or philosophical basis, to the Freedoms at the core of the free software movement. Lessig’s cries for ‘free culture’ are not accompanied by a description of what freedoms – of use, of distribution, or of modification – free culture will provide.

CC has replaced what could have been a call for a world where essential rights are unreservable with the relatively hollow call for ‘some rights reserved.’ If the free software example is representative of how things might have been, the total amount of freedom the consumers of creative works enjoy in the future may be the price paid for CC’s popularity.

It is not too late to discuss which rights should be unreservable in an era of free information. In fact, the rumblings of a movement to do just this have begun. Richard Stallman and others have withdrawn their support of Creative Commons and have expressed interest in supporting a ‘free culture’ movement with defined goals.

Of course, the definition of freedom remains a slippery and controversial subject. Some, like Stallman, favour a model that treats functional works as distinct from artistic or political pieces. Others have argued persuasively against the division of commercial and non-commercial works from both principled and pragmatic positions. Consensus is hardly forthcoming.

But free software was hardly built two decades ago through consensus in the software development community. The success of the free software model was built through the hard work of Stallman and the GNU project, and the free and open source software communities. The movements’ widespread popularity has been cemented through the benefits; pragmatic and principled, that only became evident with time.
Whether in unison or cooperating in separate groups, it is time for those those of us that feel strongly about freedom to discuss, decide, and move forward with our own free information movement built upon a standard of freedom. When we have defined free information in terms of essential freedoms, a subset of Creative Commons works and a subset of Creative Commons licenses will provide tools and texts through which a social movement can be built.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sa/1.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA

FOOTNOTES

¹ The current version of the GPL is the second version. A third version is currently being worked on by the Free Software Foundation

² The Open Source Definition (OSD) was a verbatim copy of the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) that has diverged slightly over time – a checklist of qualities useful in determining compliance to the letter and spirit of the FSD. When the FSD is mentioned in this piece, it in almost all cases be substituted for either the OSD or the DFSG

³ Raw statistics of web links to the different licences are as good an indicator as we have of the licences’ popularity. They are available at http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-fr/2005-February/000295.htm and elsewhere

Benjamin Mako Hill <mako@atdot.cc> is a technology and intellectual property researcher, activist, and consultant. He is currently working as a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Laboratory in the Electronic Publishing Group

 

The much touted ‘freedoms’ of FLOSS are coming under increasing scrutiny as they are applied to contexts beyond their original formation. Is ‘freedom as in speech’ enough or are there other freedoms upon which the construction of the commons depends? Martin Hardie has worked extensively on an archeology of how the GNU/Linux operating system was developed, exposing the myths that are at its foundation. Here, he asks how the licensing of FLOSS operates within the constitution of Empire and locates in the new forms of ‘producing in common’ the means to reverse the proliferation of alternative law and instead affirm a true alternative to law

The key to the coming community is a positive possibility for a means against the destruction which the society of the spectacle wreaks on the common. The spectacle, the form that capital takes in today’s globalised world, is the ‘extreme form of the expropriation of the common’ where ‘our own linguistic nature comes back to us inverted’. It is on this terrain that we also find ‘a positive possibility that can be used against it’.¹ In pursuing an archaeology of the Linux computer operating system and Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS), this positive possibility embodies in many ways my quarry.²

Despite its rhetoric of freedom, FLOSS does not directly address how it is captured within capital. What implications this has, and how, despite this, it may offer some possibility of life beyond the spectacle is absent from any debate. FLOSS sits comfortably within the Chestnut Cafe of Nineteen Eighty Four – a space where free spirits gathered for human contact and a sense of community allowing the possibility of open expression within the strictures of Orwell’s repressive state.³ The logic of FLOSS seems only to promise a new space for entrepreneurial freedom where we are never exploited or subject to others’ command. The sole focus upon ‘copyright freedom’ sweeps away consideration of the processes of valorisation active within the global factory without walls.⁴ It denies the necessary productive force that FLOSS provides for new forms of capital. In this Chestnut Cafe we are never subject to the machine of capital, we are machines of capital. The archetype of the Yankee inventor is teleported from its 19th century home through time into cyberspace. Free of the chains that bound us to the old system, we are now vogelfrei - free as the birds – to participate in the new global hi-tech economy.⁵

This lacuna in the logic of FLOSS brings up the difference between ‘the common’,⁶ and ‘the commons’ of ‘movements’ such as the Creative Commons or FLOSS. The latter notion appears as a vast basin of things ready for consumption, facilitated by a commons constituted by law. The common takes on a somewhat different form. It does not concern individuals’ ability to consume, but focuses upon relations, life and production in common. These two notions are as different as the village and the castle on the mountain of which Kafka wrote.⁷

FLOSS appears as a somewhat ‘a-historical’ form of freedom, in the sense that its logic locates its particular genealogy within a transcendental and ever present notion of foundational legal principle, rather than any material, historical or productive forces. Once read within a broader history of time machines – that is the quest for and development of both time coordination and time sharing, consolidated by the development of Unix – the freedom of FLOSS begins to appear in a different and more complex light than that promoted by its popular storytelling.

One noticeable theme in the history of time machines from the second half of the 19th century until today is how American notions of freedom, innovation and law feed into the global machine of sovereignty. Time coordination – the method of doing science that gave rise in part to the telecommunications infrastructure of modernity – appears as constitutive of a form of sovereignty and production that was confined within the bounds of the corporation and the nation state. Time sharing – the method of interactive communal computing – points to an escape from these bounds. There appears an interface in this history where disciplines and practices of science, academia, law, military, sovereignty, governance, technology and mythology all become imbricated in each other. Here, power relations seem exposed, but at the same time they are hidden by law, popular stories and rhetoric. The task of excavating these relations is at once social, political, philosophical, technological, scientific and legal, therefore a biopolitical matter. This mixture appears as ‘critical opalescence’– the point at which water and vapour no longer appear stable but flash back and forth between each other.⁸ Critical opalescence is more than a mere metaphor. This is the consistent terrain on which we must seek to locate that elusive positive possibility: ‘an ambiguous and uncertain zone’, ‘where law and fact seem to become undecidable.’⁹

THE LOGIC AND RHETORIC OF FREEDOM
Considering FLOSS within this zone, two primary conditions are exposed. On one hand, there are the technical conditions, the standards, that are necessary for the perpetuation of the particular technological, informational and communications infrastructure. On the other hand, these wires transmit a rhetoric and logic that purports to be counter cultural or a ‘social movement’, based upon the alternative use of legal principles. On investigation, this ‘social movement’ appears as broadly constructive of the imperial regime and its pursuance of the creation and sustenance of global market conditions.

The narrative of FLOSS and law extends particular American notions of innovation and Intellectual Property (IP) across the globe. This logic pilots the technological processes and their protrayal in popular storytelling, feeding back into the broader meaning of freedom in today’s globalised world. It is this telling of freedom and its deference to legal principle that seems to prevent us from encountering any positive possibility.

Here law plays a unifying role. It presents a linear and unified story that masks over many of these signal flashes throughout the network. This approach reduces the contrast space of the enquiry by constraining both its presuppositions and the possible open alternatives. The discourse surrounding FLOSS is limited to only considering FLOSS as an alternative to forms of production bounded within the walls of the modern corporation and does not conceive of alternatives within the postmodern forms.¹⁰ The detail of time sharing’s history and critical opalescence defies both the linear approach and the sort of unification that the popular legal story portrays.

In the popular narrative, ‘social movements’ such as the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and its relations, the Creative Commons and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, act as ‘patriots’ and guardians of ‘our’ law and freedom.¹¹ This freedom is bound intimately with the logic of open democracy and with free and open markets. Witness pop professor and driving force behind the Creative Commons and Electronic Frontier ‘movements’, Lawrence Lessig, writing about his trip to the World Social Forum in Brazil in June 2005 under the banner of ‘The People Own Ideas’.¹² Under the subheading ‘Truly Free Market’, Lessig gets to the core of this freedom: it is about technology, wealth, efficiency and growth. In rejuvenating a long standing U.S. Republican logic, this rhetoric seeks to justify the link between science and commercial prosperity, both national and global, by invoking a moral and political vision of freedom. In its shamelessly American vision: ‘the kids at Porto Alegre’ find their solace in a ‘free culture’; an ‘economy that governed creative industries for at least the first 186 years of the American republic.’¹³

The rhetoric of FLOSS proposes the technical device (the software) and the literary device (the licence) as machines of liberty and freedom. ‘Free as in speech and not as in beer’, locates FLOSS firmly within the tradition of U.S. constitutionalism. Lessig envisages the ‘Future of Ideas’ concerning ‘our future’ as a ‘free society’ in