[-empyre-] Whither participation in light of FLOSS and (commodified) immaterial labor?

[nick knouf]

Dear participants,

Thanks to Renate and Tim for inviting me to "participate" this week, and
thanks to Hana and Sarah for starting off the discussion last week.  I'm
glad to continue questioning the notion of "participation" and the
potential for reconfiguration of the "archive".  Before I jump into my
comments, let me situate my interest in this topic.  I am keen on
understanding---and developing and reworking---the relationships between
technology, politics, and social/cultural production.  For me this means
engaging with, while at the same time critiquing and reconfiguring, free
software methodologies.  Thus I find it troubling when we are faced with
situations where _access_ to the archive (perhaps the digitized archive,
perhaps the archive of the software that runs our digitized existence)
is limited through being hidden behind paid firewalls (as in many
academic journals), private agreements (as in the Google book project),
focuses on commercial software (as happens so often within the
educational system, preventing students from engaging with free software
alternatives), or plain arrogance (as happens so often on free software
developer mailing lists).  As has been mentioned already, Derrida
described how the structure of the archive itself partially determines
what can be archived, and therefore both what is possible to represent
epistemologically and what can be brought into ontic reality.  Drawing
from science and technology studies, we can turn to the work of John Law
who describes how, "Method, then, unavoidably produces not only truths
and non-truths, realities and non-realities, presences and absences, but
also arrangements with political implications.  It crafts arrangements
and gatherings of things---and  accounts of the arrangements of
things---that could have been otherwise" (_After Method_, 143).  For me
methodology---and the materials that are used within that
methodology---is vitally important to understand, question, critique,
and develop.

I look forward to engaging more deeply with the topics over the course
of the week, but to begin I just want to offer some snippets that link
with the conversation last week and point towards some of my interests
in this area:

*  There was some mention of a particular iPhone(TM) application in
relationship to participatory sonic work.  The "TM" is important here,
as we need to be cognizant of the materiality of the iPhone as a
commodity produced for the benefit of a private corporation.  And while
the technical and popular press gushes over the possibilities of
application development on the iPhone (witness the prostrations over the
WWDC announcements today), we have to remember that the iPhone is
fundamentally a closed platform: developers have to sign non-disclosure
agreements and pay for the right to write applications; the phone itself
is expensive and limited to a technological (and, it should be noted,
artistic) elite; applications can only be installed from a centralized,
closed source; etc.  This is why I am much more interested in mobile
development on other, more open platforms such as OpenMoko or Nokia's
Symbian, platforms that offer a developer a real FLOSS (free-libre-open
source software) alternative.  (This is not to efface our own complicity
in the use of a phone produced by, say, Nokia.  Nevertheless, we can
move beyond simplistic binaries here and question the _quality_ of our
relationship to the material object: where did we get it from (is it
used, recycled), how easily can we modify it (can it be unlocked,
hacked, programmed for easily), and how easily can we share things on it
with others (are networking abilities not artificially limited for the
benefit of carrier profits).)  Now, FLOSS is not a be-all-end-all
solution, of course, as we have to be aware of troubling gender dynamics
within FLOSS culture, a certain political libertarianism (within the US
context, at least), and the exploitation of free labor (or free
cooperation, as described by Trebor Scholz, Geert Lovink, and coined by
Christopher Spehr (http://www.autonomedia.org/node/41)).  Nevertheless,
FLOSS culture offers, at the moment at least, a potential alternative to
forms of participation that would be predicated on the production of
marketable commodities (as Sean Cubitt mentioned in his post).  So, the
questions for me become: how can we consider FLOSS models with regards
to cultural production?  (Some beginning points: the FLOSS+Art book
(http://goto10.org/flossart/, available from the Pirate Bay:
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4671426/FLOSS_Art_v1.1); Matteo
Pasquinelli's _Animal Spirits_ and his critique of Creative Commons:
http://www.naipublishers.nl/art/animal_spirits_e.html .)  How might we
reconfigure the participatory model of FLOSS in a way that would not
allow free labor to be so easily recuperated into capital?  In what was
might _exclusion_ be a necessary political tactic (see
http://maicgregator.org/license )?

*  We can expand upon Bourriaud's simplistic notion of relational
aesthetics by asking the still-relevant questions posed by Claire Bishop
in her critique: okay, so we are creating relational situations, but _so
what_?  What _types_ of relationships are being formed?  For what
purposes?  To what ends?  And who benefits?  Who loses?  This connects
with my interest in the relationship between FLOSS and cultural
production by asking what needs to be done to develop these methdologies
in ways that are both optimistic and do not merely valorize the "social
relationship" as such.

*  Whither the archive when it is owned by Google?  As Universities give
up their control over their library holdings (while also turning over
their e-mail services to commercial entities like Google or Microsoft
(see http://www2.cit.cornell.edu/ensemble/ for an example) without
providing their constituents a copy of the agreement signed), what
becomes of our ability to reconfigure the archive as it exists?  To
question how the archive is structured?  To question what appears or
doesn't appear in the archive?  For a way to experience what is at
stake, see the China Channel Firefox extension
(http://www.chinachannel.hk/) as well as the recent news articles about
the requirements for filtering software to be installed on all machines
sold in China (http://government.zdnet.com/?p=4906 ).

*  Finally, I want to return to a project that I discussed here back in
April called MAICgregator, a Firefox extension that aggregates
information about the military-academic-industrial complex (MAIC).  I
won't rehearse the discussion that happened there (see these posts in
the empyre "archive":
https://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2009-April/001416.html
).  Suffice it to say, however, that I am interested in the ways that
Firefox extensions, through the ability to rewrite web pages inline,
offer options for the reconfiguration and recombination of existing
archival sources on the web.  While I share with Sean Cubitt a certain
nostalgia for the so-called "revolutionary web", I also wonder what
options currently exist, even within this commercial space, for
recapturing some of this vitality and radical intent.

Best,

nick knouf