[ox-en] Jamie King * The Packet Gang - Openness And Its Discontents
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2004 21:34:49 +0100
Hi list, hi Jamie!
I don't know whether Chris mentioned it here already, but this piece
from Jamie is particularly interesting:
http://gig.openmute.org/modules/wakka/PacketGang
and absolutely relevant to the OHA debate. It provides also many hooks
to hang a debate on. I'll quote some parts of it I find most
interesting for the Oekonux debate. Please refer to the web site for
the literature references.
Sorry, it is not only in this format a bit hard to identify the quoted
material. I hope I indented the right parts.
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
PS: If I understand correctly this has been published on 2003-11-27 -
i.e. before the "We Seize!" event
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The Packet Gang
[PART ONE]
Openness And Its Discontents
J.J. King.
In the first part of this two-part investigation, J.J. King examines
the idea, image and ideology of openness in its deployments in
activism and contemporary capitalism: fields, he argues, that are
articulated by an identical network model. Part One introduces the
'idea of openness' in the context of the social movements, and reviews
some key problems encountered in practically realised examples of open
organisation. What are the realities of openness in practice?
1. THE IDEA OF OPENNESS
Since the founding of the Free Software Foundation in 1985 by Richard
Stallman and the Open Source Initiative in 1998 by Eric Raymond, the
idea of openness has enjoyed some considerable celebrity. Simply
understood, open source software is that which is published along with
its source code, allowing developers to collaborate, improve upon each
other's work, and use open code in their own projects. This open model
of development acquired a significant cachet from the high-profile
success of GNU-Linux, a piece of Free-as-in-Libre and Open Source
Software (FLOSS). Taken together with the distributed co-compostion
offered by, for example, the Wiki architecture,[1] and the
potentialities of peer-to-peer networks like Bittorrent and
Gnutella[2], a more nuanced and loose idea of openness has suggested
itself as a possible model for other kinds of organisation. This model
is well described by Felix Stalder of Openflows:
communal management and open access to the informational resources
for production, openness to contributions from a diverse range of
users/producers, flat hierarchies, and a fluid organizational
structure.[3]
This idea of openness is now frequently deployed not only with
reference to composing software communities but also to political and
cultural groupings. For many, this is easily explained: FLOSS's
'self-evident' realisation of a 'voluntary global community empowered
and explicitly authorized to reverse-engineer, learn from, improve and
use-validate its own tools and products' indicates that 'it has to be
taken seriously as a potential source of organizing for other realms
of human endeavour.'[4] In such circles, openness is now seen as
'paradigmatic'. Tim O'Reilly's presentation at the Reboot conference
in 2003, 'The Open Source Paradigm Shift', placed FLOSS at the
leading-edge of a social phenomenon 'whose time has come'; its methods
of ad-hoc, distributed collaboration constituted a 'new paradigm' at a
level consistent with, for example, the advent of the printing press
and movable type.[5]
[...]
But the broad-church appeal of the idea of openness suggested by FLOSS need not necessarily be a cause for celebration, especially since many of the constituencies making use of it conceive of themselves as fundamentally opposed. Can the idea of openness these divergent constituencies have really be the same? Can it be that they consider it sufficient to their very different aims? These questions will be explored later in this piece, but also in more detail in its second part.
[...]
2. 'THE REVOLUTION WILL BE OPEN SOURCE'
It is too relatively easy to make sweeping generalisations about the
ways in which the social movement realises the idea of openness.
Instead we need to look at the ways in which the kind of openness read
in FLOSS may practically correspond with specific moments of
organisation in the social movements. I think it is possible to see a
certain correspondence in five key areas:
1. Meetings & Discussions
The time and location of physical meetings are published in a
variety of places, online and off. The meetings themselves are most
often open to all comers, sometimes with the exception of
'traditional' media. Although often no recordings or pictures are
allowed at meetings, there is rarely any other vetting of those who
are attending. Anyone is allowed to speak, although there is often a
convenor or moderator whose role is to keep order and ensure
progress. Summaries of discussion are often posted on the Web (see
3., Documentation.) where they can be read by those unable to attend
a physical meeting or those otherwise interested in it.
The same is true of IRC meetings, which anyone may attend, and for
which the 'logs' are usually published (see, again, Documentation.)
Net-based mailing lists, by which much discussion is carried out,
are usually open subscription and, like physical meetings, those
joining are not vetted.
2. Decision-Making
Most often, anyone present at a meeting may take part in the
decisions made there, although these conditions may occasionally be
altered. Currently, the majority of decision making uses the
'consensus' method, in which any person present not agreeing with a
decision can either choose to abstain or veto ('block'). A block
causes an action or decision to be stopped.
3. Documentation
In general, documents that form organisational materials within the
movement are published online, usually using a content management
system such as Wiki. In most cases, it is possible for even casual
visitors to edit and alter these documents, although it is possible
to 'roll back' to earlier versions in, for example, the case of
defacements.
4. Demonstrations
The majority of demonstrations are organised using the above
methods. Not only is their organisation 'open', but within a certain
range of political suasion anyone may attend. Self-policing is not
'hard' but 'soft'.
5. Actions
Even some 'actions', concentrated, usually smaller interventions,
are 'open', using the above methods to organise themselves and even
allowing actors into the network as the 'action' is ongoing.
Thus some key moments within the social movement share characteristics
with ideas of openness read in FLOSS. Indeed, as is seen above, the
movement uses many of the same services as FLOSS communities (i.e.,
Wiki, IRC and mailing lists) to organise itself and carry out its
projects. But its characteristic uses of openness are not enshrined in
any formal document. Rather, they have developed as way of organising
that is tacitly understood by those involved in the social movement:
an idea of openness that, in differing degrees, inflects its
organisation throughout. Although the principles are not rigidly
followed, there is often peer criticism of groups who do not declare
their agendas or who act in a closed, partisan fashion, and in general
a group or project wanting to keep itself closed has an onus to
declare the reasons for this to other groups.
[...]
In other words it is the open, networked, horizontal form of the
movement that produces its radical potential for social change: the
message, yet again, is the medium. In the case of the self-declared
'open publishing' project Indymedia, for example, the open submission
structure is said to collapse the distinction between media producer
and consumer, allowing us to 'become the media'. The Indymedia
newswire, write the collective, works on the principle of OPEN
PUBLISHING, an essential element of the Indymedia project that allows
anyone to instantaneously self-publish their work on a globally
accessible web site. The Indymedia newswire encourages people to
become the media [...] While Indymedia reserves the right to develop
sections of the site that provide edited articles, there is no
designated Indymedia editorial collective that edits articles posted
to the www.Indymedia.org news wire.[16]
Here, the idea of openness presents itself as absolutely inimical to
the 'dominant multinational global news system,' where 'news is not
free, news is not open'. With open publishing, by contrast, the
process of creating news is transparent to the readers. They can
contribute a story and see it instantly appear in the pool of stories
publicly available. Those stories are filtered as little as possible
to help the readers find the stories they want. Readers can see
editorial decisions being made by others. They can see how to get
involved and help make editorial decisions. If they can think of a
better way for the software to help shape editorial decisions, they
can copy the software because it is free and change it and start their
own site. If they want to redistribute the news, they can, preferably
on an open publishing site.
The working parts of journalism are exposed. Open publishing assumes
the reader is smart and creative and might want to be a writer and an
editor and a distributor and even a software programmer [...] Open
publishing is free software. It's freedom of information, freedom for
creativity.[17]
Accounts such as this and De Angelis' bear out my argument that an
extreme amount of expectation is being placed on openness as an agent
for change. Not only is idea of openness central to the organisation
of the social movements, but in many cases it is taken that the
organisational quality of openness is inherently radical and will be
productive of radical change in whichever part of the social-political
field it is deployed. This is seen, for example, in the work of the
group Open Organisations, comprised of three individuals who were
previously closely involved with UK Indymedia, and who have have until
relatively recently been united in their belief in the radically
liberatory potentials of openness. For them, it is simply an as-yet
insufficiently theorised and elaborated form and thus they have been
working on what might be characterised as a 'strong' or 'robust'
openness model which recommends a set of working processes or
practices intended to foster it. An 'Open Organisation' is one that
anyone can join, with complete transparency and flexible and fair
decision making structures, ownership patterns, and exchange
mechanisms, that are designed, defined, and refined, by members as
part of a continual transformative and learning process.[18]
3. CRYPTO-HIERARCHIES & PROBLEMS WITH OPENNESS
In effect, by creating 'structured processes', Open Organisations try
to provide for a consistent openness. In doing so, they implicity
recognise that there are problems with contemporary political
organisation. But what are these problems, and where are openness'
discontents? In fact they may be found everywhere. In the case of
Inydmedia's 'open publishing' project, for example, openness has been
failing under pressures of scale. Initially small 'cottage-industry'
IMCs have been able to manage the open-publishing process very well.
But in many IMCs, when the number of site visitors has risen past a
certain level, problems have begun. Popular IMC sites become a target
for interventions by political opponents, often from the fascist
right, seeking opportunities to disrupt what they regard as an IMC's
'countercultural' potential, and to co-opt the IMC readers' attention
for their own messages. Of course there is nothing to prevent this in
the openly declared IMC manifesto; but it has impelled the
understandable decision to edit out fascist viewpoints and other
'noise', using the ad-hoc teams whose function was previously to
enable the IMC's open-publishing system. Such ad-hoc IMCs, ultimately,
have been seen to take on a rather traditional, closed and censorial
function that, unfortunately, is too often undeclared and in
contradiction with the official IMC 'become the media' line. As a
result, Indymedia channels are often politically censored by a small
group of more-or-less anonymous individuals to a rather high degree.
This emergence of soft-control within a particular 'open' moment
within the social movement is becoming a common and tacitly
acknowledged problem. As with Indymedia, practical issues with open
development and organisation too often give the lie to enthusiastic
promotion of openness as an effective alternative to representation.
After one PGA meeting, the group sans-titre had this to say:
Whenever we have been involved in PGA-inspired action, we have been
unable to identify decision-making bodies. Moreover, there has been no
collective assessment of the effectiveness of PGA-inspired actions
[...] If the PGA-process includes decision-making and assessment
bodies, where are they to be found? How can we take part?[19]
This problem runs in across and through the temporary constitutions
and dissolutions of 'open' organisations that make up the social
movement. The avowed 'absence' of decision-making bodies and points of
centralisation can too easily segue into a concealment of control per
se. In fact, in both the FLOSS model and the social movements, the
idea that no one group or person controls development and decision
making is often quite far from the truth. In both cases it is formally
true that anyone may alter or intervene in processes according to
their needs, views or projects; but practically speaking, few people
can assume the right social position from which to make effective
'interventions'. Open Source software is generally tightly controlled
by a small group of people: the Apache Group, for example, very
open-handedly controls the development of the Apache Web server, while
Linus Torvalds has the final say on Linux kernel development;[20]
likewise, in the social movements, decision making often devolves to a
surprisingly small number of individuals and groups who make a lot of
the running in deciding what happens, where and when; the obverse of
'flash mob' spontaneity. Though they never officially 'speak for'
others, and are often the first to preach the dogma of
non-hierarchical, open, multitudinous organisation, much unofficial
doctrine nonetheless emanates from them. Within political networks,
such groups and individuals can be seen as 'supernodes', not only
routing more than their 'fair share' of traffic, but actively deciding
the 'content' that traverses the networks they form such an important
part of. Such supernodes do not (always) constitute themselves out of
a malicious will-to-power; rather power defaults to them through
personal qualities like energy, commitment and charisma, and the
ability to synthesise politically important social moments into
identifiable ideas and forms.
This (partial) control by crypto-hierarchy, is tacit, knowledge for
many who have first hand experience with open organisation in the
socail movement. This statement from one political activist,
introduced to what he calls 'the chaos of open community' at a
Washington State forest blockade camp in 1994, and who later became
involved in the Carters Road Community, is typical:
the core group, by virtue of being around longer as individuals, and
also working together longest as a sub group, formed unintentional
elites. These elite groups were covert structures in open consensus
based communities which said loudly and clearly that everyone?s
influence and power was equal [...] We all joined in with a vigorous
explanation that [...] there were no leaders [...] The conspiracy to
hide this fact among ourselves and from ourselves was remarkably
successful. It was as though the situation where no leaders existed
was known, deep down by everyone to be impossible, outsiders were
able to say so, but communards were hoping so much that it was not
true that they were able to pretend...[21]
To examine how much this 'pretense' is the rule within the social
movements is beyond the scope of this piece. But what is clear is that
each of the five 'openness' characteristics decribed above can only be
fully understood as severely limited or mitigated. In meetings and
discussions, the time and location of physical meetings are
published-- but who is aware of that publication, and who therefore
has access to the meeting, is highly dependent on which
(technological/social) networks they are able (and often privileged to
be able) to connect to; likewise the language of a 'call' or
equivalent can determine whether a party will feel comfortable or
suitable to respond to it: like PGA's 'hallmarks', language and
phraseology is a point of 'soft control', but not one that is openly
discussed and studied. More, the meetings may be 'open to all', but
they can quickly become hostile environments (if rarely physically so)
for parties who do not or cannot observe the 'basic' consensus that is
often tacitly agreed between long-term actors in a particular scene.
This peer-consensus can indeed, on occasion, so determine the
movement's 'open' decision-making process as to turn it into a war of
attrition on difference, with divergent points of view gradually
giving themselves up to peer opinion as the 'debate' wears on and on
and, often, on. The 'block' or 'veto' is in fact rarely used because
of the peer pressure placed on those who would use it ('Aw, come on,
you're not going to block, are you?'- a common enough plaint at
movement meetings.) In some cases the apparently neutral 'moderator'
role can also become bizarrely instrumentalised, giving rise to the
sensation that 'something has already been decided', and the meeting
is just for performative purposes.
Likewise, documentation of meetings and decisions usually only tells
'half the story'. Points of serious contention are frequently left out
on the grounds that the actors involved in the disagreement might not
want it to be published. This 'smoothing over' of serious difference
is quite normal. In fact participants in IRC discussions very often
inflect what they are going to say because of the future publication
of the logs, using private channels to discuss key points and only
holding 'official' discussions and 'lines' in the open. Too often the
open channel only 'hears' what it is supposed to hear and important
exchanges are not published.
All of this explains why activist theorists, way ahead of pundits like
Douglas Rushkoff, think-tanks like Demos, and self-styled movement
'representatives' are beginning to interrogate the experiment with
openness. They have significant resources to draw upon. A critical
document from the 1960s feminist liberation movement: Jo Freeman's
'The Tyranny of Structurelessness', provides a critique of the
'laissez faire' ideal for group structure that is still absolutely
relevant today. Such structures can become, Freeman argues,
a smoke screen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned
hegemony over others. Thus, structurelessness becomes a way of
masking power. As long as the structure of the group is informal,
the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few, and
awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules.[22]
Freeman's insight is fundamental: the idea of openness does not in
itself prevent the formation of the informal structures that I have
designated here as crypto-hierarchies; on the contrary, it is possible
that it fosters them to a greater degree than structured
organisations. Undeneath its rhetoric of openness, the
non-hierarchical organisation can thus take on the qualities of a
'gang', which, as identified by Jacques Camattes and Gianna Collu in
1969, tend to hide the existence of their informal ruling cliques to
appear more attractive to outsiders, feed on the creative abilities of
individual members whilst suppressing their individual contributions,
and producing layers of authority contingent on individuals'
intellectual or social dominance. 'Even in those groups that want to
escape [it]', writes Camattes, 'the [...] gang mechanism nevertheless
tends to prevail[...] The inability to question theoretical questions
independently leads the individual to take refuge behind the authority
of another member who becomes, objectively, a leader, or behind the
group entity, which becomes a gang.'[23]
OPENESS: OPEN TO ALL CONSTITUENCIES
These internal problems are not only experienced by the social
movements; nor are they the most significant 'problem with openness'
the social movements must face. Compare the complaints by the open
community activist above to those made by an office worker who is
lamenting non-hierarchical organisation in the workplace:
there are a lot of people suffering great anxiety and disempowerment
because they are the victims of [...] apparently non-hierarchical
organisational structures. It is clear who has power and who does
not, but power is wielded without clear responsibility and a
recognition of the boundaries between roles. Instructions are just
'suggestions', but God help you if you don't interpret these
suggestions in the right way.[24]
In the next part of this investigation, I will examine in detail the
idea of openness in the corporate-industrial setting, and via that
scene, turn to the information architecture that organises and
articulates the two: the Internet, and Transfer Control Protocol /
Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). Whilst there are, of course, substantial
differences between the problems encountered with capital-industrial
'openness' and those we see in the emancipatory context, the uses of,
hopes for, and problems with openness encountered in the
'post-Fordist' capital economy are entirely relevant to organisational
experiments in the social movements. The vicious crypto-hierarchies of
contemporary 'fluid' work in the 'factory without walls' have
interesting resonances with 'open' activist networks; and the
anxieties of the postmodern worker seem to chime curiously with the
anxieties of the postmodern activist. What needs to be thoroughly
explored is how it came to be that the structures through which
contemporary capitalism ('Empire') advances itself should have become
so similar to, perhaps even identical with, those used by resistance.
And given that these two old enemies, power and counterpower, are
simultaneouslt escalating their struggles while becoming less
inimical, more intimate, operating across the same
techno-organisational structures what strategies are left to 'us'?
What new terrains of contestation are revealed as the open, networked
form collapses the territory of resistance into the territory of the
Sovereign?
What the first part of this investigation has indicated is that the
idea of openness which is receiving such a promotion on the heels of
the Free-Libre and Open Source software movement is not, in and of
itself, an immediately sufficient alternative to the bankrupt
structures of representation. There seem to be good reason for the
discontent felt by many activists with open organisation, much of it
on evidence that must remain, by nature, anecdotal. But what is clear
is that, if we are going to promote open organisation within the
social movements, we must also take care to scrutinise the tacit flows
of power that underlie and undercut it. The initial accounts here
suggest that once the formal hierarchial membrane of group
organisation are dismantled- in which, for example software
composition or political decision-making have previously taken place,
what remains are tacit control structures. In Free-Libre and Open
Source Software limitations to those who can access and alter source
code are formally removed; what then comes to define such access, and
the software that is produced, are underlying determinants: education,
social opportunity, social connections and affiliations. The most open
system theoretically imaginable would only reveal more perfectly the
predicating inequities of the wider environment in which it is
situated; and so what the idea of openness may reveal first and most
importantly is that a really open organisation cannot be realised
without radicalising of the social-political field in which it
operates.
_______________________
http://www.oekonux.org/