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George N. Dafermos * Global Pessimists or Global Optimists - How the Free/Open Source Software Community responds to the Global Pessimists and the Counter-Globalisation Movement [2/2] (was: [ox-en] Conference documentation / Konferenzdokumentation) (was: [ox-en] Conference documentation / Konferenzdokumentation)



[continued]

Answering the anti-case: The F/OSSD Paradigm
============================================

The matter of fact is the F/OSS community counters the global
pessimists on several grounds: First, marketing within the community
and marketing of F/OSS technologies is not coercive or
corporate-engineered in any sense, instead it is of 'the markets are
conversations' kind [7]. Second, community formation, cohesion,
identity and norms are of paramount importance for F/OSS development
models to be fruitful and sustainable. And even though software is at
the forefront of global capitalism [8], it hasn't altered or
diminished the significance of community ethics or community
development. Third, as far as companies whose business and revenue
model is based on F/OSS are concerned, industrial fragmentation and
consolidation are avoided as a result of intra-industry sharing of
information in the form of obligatory exchange of product
specifications (source code) [9] and indeed the political processes of
the community dictate corporate behaviour and precede firm strategy.
But let's examine each one of those claims in more detail.

Marketing and Support
---------------------

To begin with, marketing of F/OSS technologies is not manipulative and
does not aim at manufacturing needs. Joseph Schumpeter (1911) was
perhaps the first to identify that for technological products to
succeed in the marketplace, "consumers are educated by the producer;
they are taught to want new things"; a relationship between
salesmanship, advertising and consumption that John Kenneth Galbraith
(1958) later dubbed the dependence effect. In the Affluent Society,
Galbraith made a compelling case that had products not been
advertised, wants would not have existed. He held the view that the
industrial revolution, for all the celebrated improvements it brought
about in the production side, had developed a reliance upon the
artificial arousal of needs, the implications of which, Cluetrain
Manifesto co-authors David Weinberger and Doc Searls note, were deemed
to change the marketplace dynamics forever. In their account of the
Industrial Interruption, Weinberger and Searls explain that customers'
behaviour would have to be homogenised for mass consumer markets
served by mass products to prevail. This homogenisation of consumers'
purchasing patterns would be achieved through mass marketing
techniques. And so organisations invented mass media for the top-down
delivery of their marketing messages and PR pitches. Conversing with
the marketplace was replaced by corporate-fed brainwashing and
marketing persuasion. One-way marketing communications instead of
two-way market conversations. Consumers rather than customers. And so
the argument went that consumers should learn to consume what is been
given to them without wasting corporate resources by expecting
products customised to their individual wants. Without expecting that
they could speak to the company. If and when needed, the company would
speak to them through the bloodless and anonymous face of mass media.
No compromises. They can have any colour they want as long as it's
black. And if they ever grow unhappy with black, a proper doze of
prime-time marketing hysteria will convince them otherwise.

Now, in stark contrast to a world characterised by mass products, mass
media and mass marketing, F/OSS relies upon word-of-mouth. At
gatherings of Linux User Groups [38] (LUG), users share their
experiences, advocate their favourite F/OSS technologies, and help
newcomers and the less technically advanced get hands-on experience
from mature users. Software installations are turned into technical
fiestas where people bring their own computers and have Linux
installed on them by other end-users. No marketing gigs. Just people
helping each other and spreading the word. Just bring your computer
and rest assured that someone will happily install Linux for you. LUGs
are local communities of Linux users communicating mainly through
online mailing lists but they also organise physical events. Chances
are that a LUG is near you. Some of them are of course larger and more
vibrant than others but the essence is that those events are not an
excuse for an exclusive, closely-knit group to hang around together.
They are instead gatherings designed to raise public awareness about
the advantages of Linux and they move far beyond a mere demonstration
of Linux's technical capabilities: they get you started with
cutting-edge expertise from other users. Marketing departments,
usually badly informed of their clientele's actual needs and only
caring for the goals set from above, would have to spend a fortune to
come close to the effectiveness and usefulness that LUGs provide for
free. There is only one better way to proselytise and get users hooked
on the Linux operating systemt than LUG meetings: selling computers
with Linux preinstalled. Here, Linux comes quite behind other
operating systems but industry dynamics are slowly changing this. But
by looking at LUGs, one realises that most people attending LUG
meetings built their own Linux relationships, not so much to the Linux
operating system but to each other.

In the classic The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell (2000: 169-192)
argues that the dynamics of such groups are pivotal in order to
engineer social epidemics that transform outsiders to striking
bestsellers. LUGs make sure that Linux becomes a linking thread
between individuals and small local groups. Once you attend one local
meeting, it is certain that you will also go to the next one. Consider
what happens when you go to such a gathering: you have Linux installed
on your laptop. After a month, you go to the next gathering and share
your experience with your new operating system with other people. You
may also have new needs and enquiries and you hope that someone will
be there to help you with. Most probably, you will have stumbled upon
a technical matter and someone will be there to help you again. You
also get to see the same person who installed Linux for you and you
start talking about how Linux works for you. As you attend more
meetings, relationships begin to develop and you no longer see those
people as Linux enthusiasts that try to sell you on a technology. They
have become a critical part of your own community. In the process, you
will be eventually installing Linux on other people's computers and
helping them get started. The same virtuous circle of social
connections goes on and on. In the end, you have become a volunteer
Linux marketer.

Of course, word-of-mouth marketing is not solely confined to LUG
meetings. The cyberspace has proven to be an excellent forum for the
continuation of democratic public discourse on matters of interest to
the community. At online discussion forums dedicated to the community,
F/OSS users tell their own experiences and ignite discussion within
the community. It is no coincidence that most of those discussion
forums are weblogs - constantly updated, dynamic story-based websites
like Slashdot [http://slashdot.org/], Newsforge
[http://newsforge.com/] and Linux Weekly News [http://lwn.net/] whose
lifeblood is the vibrant discourse among website users who post their
opinions, leave comments, respond to other people's posts, and debate
the pros and cons of each other's position. Some posts have a
polemical flavour and adopt an authoritative stance of the we should
all use F/OSS if we want to be in control of our own computers type
whereas other people ask the community's opinion on how to best market
F/OSS or seek help as they stumble upon a configuration problem. This
is marketing from the market's perspective: end users advocate a
technology, educate others how to use it, provide support, organise
political actions related to F/OSS, and undertake the role of a
marketer by communicating all that Linux symbolises to a wider
audience. Not a petty task.

Sure enough, there are plenty who claim that Linux and F/OSS
technologies could gain from an aggressive marketing approach [39].
Not everyone agrees that weblogs and LUGs suffice to catapult F/OSS
into the lucrative mainstream market. Word-of-mouth marketing and
weblogs are indispensable to spread the word and ignite social
epidemics among like-minded people and generally people in IT circles,
but when it comes to reaching the masses their effectiveness is
limited. At the Newsforge community weblog, a Linux user by the name
of Elwin Green (2002) expressed his discontent with the lack of
prime-time marketing for Linux. "What Linux needs is not features but
marketing", Green cried out and pointed out the need for a centralised
professional marketing force with dedicated financial resources to
push Linux. A month later, Jesse Smith (2002) wrote that Linux should
be marketed in a manner similar to cars, and Sandeep Krishnamurthy
(2002) proposed that "open source thinking be applied to marketing".
Among many things, he suggested that in the spirit of collaboration
organisations adopting F/OSS for internal use should act as
references, the community should decide on a single message that the
commercial world will be receptive to, and that tested marketing tools
and processes should be integrated into a coherent F/OSS value
proposition. Put bluntly, the community should analyse and segment the
market by using the very same tools and frameworks that business
school graduates are familiar with and corporate marketing departments
are so fond of, and market the product accordingly. In a sense, the
community should act as a typical marketer and deploy all those tools
that a typical marketer would be expected to use. Interestingly, the
community is already moving towards these directions. Employees
involved with F/OSS implementations at commercial companies act as
references [40]. And the Open Source Enterprise Project
[http://www.opensourceenterprise.org/] led by Scott Allen, Jason
Coward and Flemming Funch is taking huge steps to apply open source
thinking to marketing by creating a large pool of marketing resources
that the community could draw on in order to better market F/OSS
technologies.

Perhaps the real problem lies in our perception of what good marketing
really is. Stark and Neff, after spending several months researching
new media dot.coms in the area of New York, concluded that when the
market demand for a software-based product requires significant space
for customisation and flexibility (that will in turn allow the product
to be further modified at a later stage), centralised organisation of
processes and finalised product designs tend to lose. As a direct
consequence of this paradigm shift in manufacturing from mass-market
products to highly customised solutions, marketing as usual is
decreasing in importance and effectiveness. But why? Those dot.coms
constructed web-based systems (like corporate websites) for their
clients. The clients, naturally, wanted the best value for their
money: web-based systems that could be easily maintained, updated,
changed and redesigned as market variables dictated. In this market,
and for this group of customers, shrinkwrapped, out-of-the-shelf
products is a realistic option, but it is nonetheless not the most
attractive option on offer for reasons of flexibility.
Out-of-the-shelf solutions provide the most basic level of
functionality, and in their majority fiddling with the underlying
technology in order to extend the existent level of functionality is
impossible for a variety of reasons (ie. source code is not
distributed with the solution, the legal license used prohibits such
fiddling and tinkering practices without permission, and so forth). In
industries heavily dependent upon software (like the Web engineering
and development industry segment that Neff and Stark analysed),
software is seen as a service rather than a product. And as every
marketer knows, the marketing of services is diametrically different
to that of products. For if there's no finalised product design, (and
no demand for it) the marketing effort should not be put in
highlighting a feature or two of the software that might be gone in
the next version, or even worse, those features might not be the ones
sought by prospective customers. Indeed, and insofar as software is
concerned, the current marketplace reality asks for permanently beta
products - flexible, reconfigurable, malleable solutions whose only
marketing requirement is that one should know where to go to find it
(and information about it).

This trend is best illustrated by Linux. Is, businesswise, Linux a
product or a service? And is my Linux the same as yours? Nowadays,
Linux is being sold and marketed in many different contexts by many
commercial entities catering for many different groups of users.
SuSe's Linux is different from Red Hat's, and Red Hat's is different
from Mandrake's. Does it make then sense to market all of them
uniformly? Of course not, but this is not due to concerns over brand
differentiation. Linux is the desktop system of choice for lots of
normal folk because it enables them to configure and customise their
computing environment to suit their individual needs. As regards to
corporate clients, rather than individual customers, the in-house
adoption of Linux is clearly treated as a service that is initiated
with an analysis of requirements, goals, objectives, etc., continues
with the development phase, the end-user education phase, the testing
phase, the final roll-out phase, and extends beyond all these phases
to encompass future support and maintenance. Eric Raymond puts it "the
software industry is 95% not a manufacturing industry". And as the
marketing of manufactured products has striking differences to the
marketing of highly customised 1-to-1 products and services, we should
move beyond typical marketing-as-noise to marketing as knowing where
to go to get some help and information.

Community norms shape development
---------------------------------

The viability of F/OSS development models is based upon community
norms.

o    All releases of source code must be accompanied with a text file
     listing contributors.

o    forking is not allowed ?? (forking is freedom, does it deserve
     the negetive connoation, and should we see it as an attribute of
     organisational decadence?)

     o    distributing changes without the leaders' approval is
          frowned upon

     o    meritocracy prevails (natural selection from the community)
          trusted lieutenants

     o    meritocracy, transparency, involvement, community-management

     o    GPL is a form of social contract: makes sure no window

In every released version of Linux, there is a file attached which
lists all those who have contributed (code). Credit attribution if
neglected, is a cardinal sin that will breed bitterness within the
community and discourage developers from further contributing.
Furthermore, distributing changes without the leader's approval is
frowned upon and can only be justified in extreme cases. This has come
to be known as forking and it usually refers to the moment when a
chasm among the community of developers occurs with one side refusing
to accept the development route the other side is proposing or
implementing. The net effect of forking is that the development
community splits and so does the technology. No wonder why forking
carries such a notorious stigma. In the case of Linux, forking is
mainly avoided due to a parallel release version: a version is stable
and aims at those wanting a secure and reliable platform whereas the
other version is experimental and appeals to those with a rather
experimental urge. Indeed, the entire structural organisation of the
Linux development process is shaped by community norms. For instance,
there is only one layer between the community of Linux developers and
the leader Linus Torvalds. This small group of developers, the
so-called "trusted lieutenants" [41], interfaces between Linus T. and
the rest of the developers in response to the overwhelming burden
placed on Linus Torvalds. As the community of Linux developers grew to
unimaginable numbers, this informal mechanism, which represents a
natural selection by the community, emerged to ensure that the
technology would scale even if its leader would not. Thus, a dozen or
so hackers are responsible for maintaining a part of the Linux kernel
but the important thing to note is that the trusted lieutenants are
not managers.

Meritocracy, in other words, prevails. But it does so not only because
a meritocratic organisation excels at dealing with technological
ambiguity and also suits non-profit organisations as a suitable
motivation mechanism, the F/OSS community is a community of peers.
From a certain viewpoint, even the dominant F/OSS license can be
understood as a community norm.

The Construction of Radical Machines
====================================

We noted earlier that Negri and Hardt's Empire is by far the most
constructive attempt to analyse where the current world is heading.
After reading the book though, one is left wondering why F/OSS is not
included in the authors' analysis of affective and immaterial labour,
as well as the new general intellect that pervades the organisation of
bio-production. In Radical Machines Against Techno-Empire, Matteo
Pasquinelli (2004) takes on this task with excess zeal and raises an
important question:

There is a hegemonic metaphor in political debate, in the arts world,
in philosophy, in media criticism, in network culture: that is Free
Software. We hear it quoted at the end of each intervention that poses
the problem of what is to be done (but also in articles of strategic
marketing.), whilst the twin metaphor of open source contaminates
every discipline: open source architecture, open source literature,
open source democracy, open source city....Softwares are immaterial
machines. The metaphor of Free Software is so simple for its
immateriality that it often fails to clash with the real world. Even
if we know that it is a good and right thing, we ask polemically: what
will change when all the computers in the world will run free
software? The most interesting aspect of the free software model is
the immense cooperative network that was created by programmers on a
global scale, but which other concrete examples can we refer to in
proposing new forms of action in the real world and not only in the
digital realm? (Pasquinelli 2004)

Before attempting any deconstruction of the above, we need to
understand that Pasquinelli defines 'machines' very loosely. As he
says, software can be perceived as a machine divorced from matter.
Such an epistemology gives one the impression that what Pasquinelli
seeks is to lay emphasis on the ever-growing influence of software in
an increasingly immaterial economy made out of thin air. Indeed, the
importance of understanding what constitutes a machine and how the
re-appropriation of the means of production by the multitude is
constituted through the making of new radical autonomous machines
cannot be overstated:

Don't hate the machine, be the machine. How can we turn the sharing of
knowledge, tools and spaces into new radical revolutionary productive
machines, beyond the inflated Free Software? This is the challenge
that once upon the time was called reappropriation of the means of
production....Will the global radical class manage to invent social
machines that can challenge capital and function as planes of autonomy
and autopoiesis? Radical machines that are able to face the
techno-managerial intelligence and imperial meta-machines lined up all
around us? The match multitude vs. empire becomes the match radical
machines vs. imperial techno-monsters. How do we start building these
machines? (Ibid.)

In the above passage Pasquinelli poses the question of how to extend
the principles and success of free software beyond (free) software and
the digital sphere. This is again confusing. For if software is
penetrating the economy and society by an order of magnitude, and this
is a trend practically unstoppable to the point where all machines
will be partly or completely software-based, then why should one care
to make any conscious effort to apply the critical success factors of
free software to other domains? That the contaminating effect of
software alone will ensure this progression of events, emerges as a
reasonable hypothesis [42]. Still, without wanting to oversimplify the
implications that stem from such a plane of thought, it becomes
obvious that what Pisquarelli values most in free software is not
software per se but the organising principles behind it, the ethic of
co-operation that characterises the mode of production of a good many
free software project. While I, among many others, marvel at the
organisation model of free software projects, and theorise that this
might well be a harbinger of a rising modus operandi and civilisation,
the antithesis that forces this conception of historical flux to a
standstill is the case of crypto-hierarchies creeping into the larger
social system. In Pasquinelli's analysis, there are no doubts as to
who is the gatekeeper that ought to be discharged of his authority.
The gates of autonomy are guarded not by governments nor by
global-in-reach and not-accountable-to-anyone institutions, but by
managers. And this is precisely what he means in his advocacy that the
goal of radical machines should be to eliminate managers. But is a
world without managers possible? Here, we need to make a small
digression to define two things: the machine and the manager. Let's
start with the machine:

The machine, which is the starting - point of the industrial
revolution, supersedes the workman, who handles a single tool, by a
mechanism operating with a number of similar tools, and set in motion
by a single motive power, whatever the form of that power may be

Karl Marx, Capital. p.376

The union of all these simple instruments, set in motion by a single
motor, constitutes a machine [43]

Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Ch.19

The first definition by Marx is perhaps the most well known, but it
faces certain limitations. First, our discussion is not confined to
the industrial economy - society; our focus is impressed on the
post-industrial economy where most of production has become
informatised. Second, and as long as free software production is
concerned, the machine doesn't supersede the worker [44], and most
importantly, human programming cannot be replaced by machines - at
least not yet. From this perspective, it could be argued that
programmers enjoy a certain degree of autonomy over machines. But then
again, what does Pasquinelli mean by defining software as an
immaterial machine? And were we to accept this syllogism, what would
the exact function of an immaterial machine be like? I can only find
two possible explanations that may apply here: either software is a
machine because its operation is inextricably linked to the functions
it is meant to perform, and therefore, software as a higher-level
program co-ordinates and unites a set of otherwise separate
lower-level functions and directives that cannot be performed without
invoking the authority of the higher-level program; or Pasquinelli is
somewhat paraphrasing Lessig's view that software embodies, promotes
and regulates certain types of behaviour in accordance with the
developer's agenda. I believe that both of these explanations hold
true, but I assume, perhaps wrongly, that Pasquinelli sees software as
a machine primarily because of the former's capacity to regulate
behaviour. By reading between the lines, this view is also in
agreement with Negri and Hardt (2000) who would define a machine's
role as extending beyond the factory and the workers to control and
police behaviours. Such a machine is designed to control the
production of culture and even life by regulating behaviour. If we try
to push this definition of machine to its logical extreme, and
contemplate its importance, it becomes obvious that software lies at
the strategic annex of the empire and its nemesis. Software is a
domain of conflict; and control over software is a key aspect of
domination [45].

This critical dimension of free software can thus be contemplated from
a plane of reasoning upon which co-operation and immateriality
converge to give form and substance not only to a whole new class of
labour, but ultimately to a struggle that is subsumed within
transcendent capitalism. Linux, once celebrated for being subversive,
and hence for not being subject to capital's sphere of influence, now
seems to have been incorporated into the larger capitalist system.
This shift is partly due to the considerable effort made by commercial
companies like IBM that wish to cash in on free software, and partly
due to the similarly successful imagery projected through the
campaigns so skillfully orchestrated by non-profit organisations like
the Open Source Initiative (OSI) that have assumed the role of
promoter and guardian of many free software projects, without this
meaning that their role has been conflicting with the goals of the
same community they are meant to foster. However, and this is a
question that will trouble many inquiring minds smarter than I am, can
the free software community still assert its will over the direction
and content of the agendas of the commercial organisations that seek
to capitalise on free software? Or have the roles switched accordingly
to better reflect the growing importance of commercial dynamics in
shaping the future path of free software development? This question
invites heated debate. For if we were to adopt a slightly deviant
perspective from the one so many alleged industry experts and pundits
take as granted, that is, to stop impressing a communist flag upon
free software and an American flag upon its closed-source
counterparts, would we still attribute a subversive character to free
software? The answers to this question are very likely to vary
greatly. In recognition of the harm done by such binary thinking,
Lawrence Lessig (2002) and Bill Thompson (2004) claim that the success
of free software development (in terms of producing quality software
products) represents a correction on behalf of market and social
forces to the monolithic counter-productive economic currents that are
so deeply entrenched in the undisputed past reigns of the now
contracting industrial system, and as such it accomodates well to the
needs and wants of the expanding post-industrial system. A different
game with different rules, one would say. This rhetoric has proven
immensely helpful in influencing decision makers entrusted with
government funds and catapulting free software to the more lucrative
and favourable position it now enjoys in the corporate world. One
thing that is certain though is that none can affirmatively ascertain
the future. The ones that will play the most decisive role in
determining whether free software becomes subordinate to commercial
aims, and to what extent, are the very same people developing and
using it. For if Linux developers en masse decide the time has come
for them to claim a political stand, then, undeniably, the commercial
software world is bound to be shaken. Same applies to software and
hardware users. For if computer users realise that they can enact a
very powerful exercise in consumer sovereignty and bottom-up DIY
democracy by choosing to buy and use only software and hardware that
allows only the end-users, rather than the manufacturers, their
lawyers, and retailers, or government officials, to specify which
types of behaviour are to be protected and promoted through the use of
it, then the stage is set for a major turmoil. Many commentators and
activists have felt that this conflict lies in the epicentre of the
battle over the control of innovation through various instruments of
law (Lessig 1999, 2002; May 2000, 2003; Soderberg 2004; Toner 2003;
Victor 2004) and its terrain has been located in the realm of the
technicalities inscribed in intellectual property law which in turn
are being decided in court rooms that are closed to the wider general
public.

This tendency to ascribe great value to intellectual property should
come as no surprise. In recognition of the fact that the most valuable
corporate asset is now residing in the intangible resources located
inside an organisation, and that the manager of the present is nearly
indistinguishable from the knowledge worker [46] whose rise Charles
Handy and ...had long been prophesising,

Knowledge work = get a job, psychopathy of immaterial labour

managers now deal with issues of intellectual property

XXX(role of managers? Law does not enact changes organically)

And here we return to our discussion of the role of the managerial
elite, for managers are the organs of control, remarks Pasquinelli.
This, of course, necessitates that managers are in control of
machines. Is this a plausible assertion? Are managers the ones who
control the production of culture and even life by regulating
behaviour? Although part of the problem may emanate from my poorly
constructed definition of machine, it is nonetheless immature to
insist that the only ones commanding the machines in ways opposed to
the project of automony are managers. The multitude commands machines;
it is a machine as much as a network [47]. The all encompassing logic
that governs the Empire is also in control of machines. In between
this multitude - logic of empire dichotomy, where can we locate the
manager? Unfortunately, there is no easy answer as any attempt to
define the manager is fraught with ambiguity. A great deal of recent
management literature has been stressing the changing character of
management, animating the passage from command, control, and
supervision to leadership, vision, charisma and co-ordination [48].
Nowadays, depending on where one stands (or works), a manager can be
the embodiment of irrational authority issuing commands at every
conceivable occassion or a gentle and compassionate guide offering
help and direction in the corporate labyrinth.

The changing face of managerialism becomes all the more striking were
one to juxtapose influential managerial archetypes, and their
intersections with historically fixed reference points. In The
Managerial Revolution, published in 1941 when the prospect of an
utterly catastrophic world war had well landed in the US, we have the
image of an oligarchic society administered by corporations and ruled
by a new hybrid of organisation man that the book's author, James
Burnham, calls managers. Oddly enough, this peculiar breed of
managerialism does not bow to capitalist demands, nor does it seek to
reinforce and establish capitalist supremacy. On the contrary,
according to Burnham, these new managers would eliminate the basic
tenets of capitalism such as private property rights, yet resources
and the means of prodution would remain firmly in the hands of the
few. Despite Burnham's considerable tendency to frame his conclusions
around arbitrary assumptions derived essentially from his own desires
as pertaining to which superpower would prevail in the aftermath of
the second world war and the wrecked economy the war was most certain
to leave behind [49], Burnham got something right: the capitalist was
already in the process of becoming a dwindling figure in the
socio-economic construct in terms of power accumulation, and its
favourable location in the exercise of control was now been claimed by
a swarming power whose raison d'etre can be traced to the imperatives
of sophisticated technology and industrial planning. As George Orwell
(1946) cluefully summarised Burnham's thesis: "Capitalism is
disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising
is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither
capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic" [50].
About thirty years later in 1974, aclaimed economist John Kenneth
Galbraith revealed a similar economic arrangement in The New
Industrial State. Galbraith held that the imperatives of
industrialisation required the installation of highly planned
economies and markets, regardless of the ideological banners commonly
associated with the practice of planning. In Galbraith's view,
capitalism and communism are not as divergent as some are very eager
to believe. Their ideological billings aside, they are both centrally
planned economic systems. Communism entails a comparatively more
formal articulation of the apparatuses of planning, which can be
exercised by the state, whereas capitalism is premised on the
construction of plastic imagery and popular belief in the alleged
sovereignty of the consumer and the imagined independence of the
market as the principal governing mechanisms in a capitalist system.

Technostructure....committees....how is management exercised in the
new industrial system? Through collaborative arrangements...

Coming up with a definition of manager is not likely to give us any
useful answers, unless we can explore some creative synergy in terms
of logically fusing the definitions of manager and machine to arrive
at a definition of system. Perhaps we could accomplish this by
following the thread from the perspective of the emergence of
crypto-hierarchies. Crypto-hierarchies are obscure by definition, and
the model upon which they are premised, in their majority, resembles
an elaborate Ponzi scheme: secret-like structures modelled upon
pyramids, founded on illegitimate and irrational grounds, and designed
to exploit the many in favour of the few. Crypto-hierarchies are also
related to managers as managers constitute the first level of contact
one has when encountering a crypto-hierarchy. To enter and gain
admittance to a crypto-hierarchy, one has to go through the
gatekeeper, that is, a manager metaphorically speaking. Managers do
not have to be commercial managers; they can be elected politicans or
power(ful) nodes determining who's in and out in hermetically sealed
networks. Hence, if we conceptualise managers as gatekeepers
enthrusted with controlling access to spaces and places and flows of
information, we arrive at a fairly interesting working definition of a
system: a system is a space or place where culture and life are
produced and reproduced through a process of continuously
(re-)assigning and negotiating access to the apparatuses of control
and whose actual boundaries are determined by access in both
quantitative and qualitative terms.

Is then a world without managers possible? We can only seek a fruiful
answer to this question by first leaving our deeply entrenched notions
of organisation behind, and summoning up all the courage we have to
imagine new structures and models of organisation and collective
governance. In The Revolutionary Problem Today, Cornelius Castoriadis
(1976) argues that a world without managers has been feasible since
the dawn of the industrial revolution. "What further demonstrates the
critical distance between the managerial organisation of production
and the reality of the production process is the devastating
effectiveness of the form of labour struggle known as 'working to
ryle': chaos permeates the factory floor when workers start to apply
with the outmost precision and detail the rules and instructions they
are supposedly meant to apply to the production process" [51] (Ibid.
pp.75) According to Castoriadis, the reason there's always some room
for subjective interpretation of the rules, individual initiative,
emergent co-ordination, and improvisation is exactly due to this fact.
For the production process to come full circle, workers must retain
some degree of autonomy over their work so that the system linking the
workers to the machines to the managers doesn't come to a halt. Like a
(negative) feedback loop in a closed system, we can witness the
initiation of an endless violent circle of conflicts inside the
factory with the managers employing technology to install more
advanced forms of control, and workers responding again by various
means and in various ways. The critical point is that managers, even
in a time of history when Fordism went largely unchallenged, were
pretty much useless. A factory, says Castoriadis, could be run without
any managers (Ibid). But if managers were useless then, an unecessary
appendage to the production method at its best, and that was the case
in an economy largely dependent upon assembly-lines that prohibited
workers from taking a minute to urinate, then what are we to make of
all this today? As previously said, the conflict has now moved beyond
the factory to what Negri calls the social factory that produces and
regulates behaviours across all social fabrics. And the role of the
manager has shifted to controlling access. So, where does this leave
us? Should one try to resist gatekeepers and strive for a world with
unlimited access to every single place and space? Is that likely to
form the basis of the construction of radical machines that
Pasquinelli calls out for?

We should be aware of the fact that while greater access certainly
translates into enhanced labour mobility (and thus enhanced labour
power), freedom of information, and strengthening of democracy, it
also may come to mean greater control. Total openness could lead to
the end of privacy, and could form the constitutional basis of a
totalitarian society. One shudders to think of what total openness
would make life be like. Picture a society modelled along the lines of
George Orwell's 1984 dystopia where huge screens fitted on the walls
keep track of what one does and even what one thinks. There's no
escaping them. Screens cannot be switched off. Only members in the
highest ranks of the party have the ability to turn them off, but
doing so casts one with suspicion. This is total openness. And this is
our life, only slightly less frightening than Orwell's. In
contemporary England, one meets the apotheosis of the closed-circuit
television network. CCTVs are everywhere, in public places, in cafes,
in workplaces, and outside our homes, effectively regulating behaviour
on the pretext of keeping our neighbourhoods and streets safe from
crime. "The average commuter in London is filmed 300 times a day"
(Honore 2004). If we look hard enough, we can see a piece of free
software, an immaterial machine that is radical enough to present an
alternative to the apparatus of control that CCTV is. MudLondon
[http://space.frot.org/mudlondon.html] [52] is a Semantic-Web
technology, or more accurately, an innovative experiment in
collaborative bottom-up mapping on the Web with an Instant-Messaging
(Jabber) interface that enables one to annotate London's streets with
descriptions, in effect turning London to an open source MUD.
MudLondon is essentially what its users make it to be. From the
project's homepage: "the user is encouraged to connect new places to
the model, augmenting it with his or her own mental map, annotating
with descriptions, known postcodes (which are automatically converted
and cross-referenced with other grid location data)". The technology
has a massive potential for a wide spectrum of applications, turning
London to an interactive map where one can do many things like get
information about which streets of London are safe from CCTVs and help
squatters evade arrest [53]. This is the most obvious, tangible
advantage of free software: giving the masses radical machines that
neutralise the apparatuses of control and regulation.

** Unable to import figure Dafermos2.png **

MudLondon: Gonzo geographical mapping

Another succinct example of how free software could help unveil the
true promise of those radical machines that Pasquirelli envisions is
the aptly baptised Mapping Contemporary Capitalism.

Another open source project that deserves our attention is
indyvoter.org [http://indyvoter.org/]. What is the scope of
activisties of indyvoter? From the indyvoter website [54]:

Indyvoter.org aims to revolutionize democracy by removing the barriers
to political involvement through the use of social networks.
Individuals use simple internet tools to connect with others of like
values, promote issues important to them, and ultimately increase
their stake in social change and political progress. Progressive
communities benefit from soliciting their individual members equal say
on matters of agenda, decision making, and resource use. Dynamic,
powerful movements can be built using next generation open-source
activist tools that cover fundraising, map visualization, resource
allocation, online decision making and campaign specific tools that
bridge the digital divide.

So, what really is indyvoter.org in greater depth? According to the
Indyvoter Requirements Document
[http://vax.area.com/marc/indyvoter/requirements.html] [55], Indyvoter
is

o    An incubator for the next thousand moveon.org
     [http://www.moveon.org/]'s.

o    An issues-based non-hierarchical friend-of-a-friend activist
     resource network.

Friend-of-a-friend networks like Friendster
[http://www.friendster.com/] and Tribe.net [http://www.tribe.net/] are
viral community networks that increase points of contact via "degrees
of separation".

Issues-based activist networks increase longevity of a movement's
momentum - avoiding the post-electoral pullout of campaign-based
organizational networks like DeanSpace [http://deanspace.org/].

Non-hierarchical resource networks allow all individuals involved to
set their own agendas and personally assess and utilize pooled
community resources without the need for a central committee.

o    Indyvoter.org aims to reawaken democracy by encouraging every
     member of this viral network to organize around the issues and
     campaigns that matter most to them while distributing the power
     and resources normally organized by political parties and PACs
     across a self-organizing non-partisan online network .

o    Users can form dynamic voter blocs, be exposed to issues their
     friends care about, figure out how they can help each others'
     causes, and learn about tactics for social change that work.

o    Indyvoter.org will provide dynamic activist communities with easy
     to use tools - stuff like map visualization of government and
     other data, resource pooling tools, online decision making tools,
     and access to regional voter files.

The league of independent voters alters the political game; it
empowers people to join the protest, effectively turning normal folk
into tactical media activists; it allows people everywhere to re-write
the rules of participation and civic engagement by enabling easy group
formation. In short, it seeks to provide deanspace-like spaces to the
electorate, and to bundle the passion of deanspace-like spaces with
useful technologies like FOAF. In a nutshell, indyvoter is where
politics return to the demos.

The battle over who controls access, and consequently which criteria
inform the selection of gatekeepers and the decisions over who will be
given access and who will not, will be fought in both virtual and
non-virtual terrains. Sometimes, as it will be increasingly the case,
it will be impossbile to distinguish between virtual and non-virtual.
What free software can contribute to this battle, beyond the mere
inspiration and hands-on organisational guidance we derive from its
merit and peer-centric model of collaborative governance, is a
technological sphere that will enable us to step outside our
previously assigned role as passive consumers of reality and become
the architects of new spaces, new places, and new behaviours while
keeping a check on those still in power in the places and spaces of
the old world.

The Construction of Radical Alternatives: Enter the new world where no boundaries exist
=======================================================================================

At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in July 2001, the organiser of
the conference and a leading advocate of open source, Tim O'Reilly,
asked the attendants what they reckoned was the most significant work
of open source development in that year. They all agreed when he
suggested that this must be the gene assembler that helped the Human
Genome Project finish its work just a few days before the parallel
private effort by Celera Genomics, thus ensuring the gene sequence
remains in the public domain (Tim O'Reilly 2001). Indeed, the
sequencing of the human genome by the student heroes behind the Human
Genome Project is a remarkable success story of the open source world
that open source can outperform its closed-source, profit-driven
competitor, but mainly it illustrates the growing importance of open,
interoperable data structures, and as a logical extention open social
structures too, in a world where the construction of radical
alternatives becomes possbile, if not to say inevitable. For what is
the most radical and far-fetched scenario a human mind can conceive if
not the construction of alternative bioforms and biospheres?

We all are coming to realise, some with greater pain or delight than
others, that the sequencing of the human genome is only the first step
in a great chain of events and outstanding scientific developments
that promise to unlock pandora's box. It is now possible to produce a
perfect copy of oneself, and we could start imagining how a society of
affluence would be like where food, water, clothing, and energy will
be abundant. What once belonged solely to the realm of science -
fiction, now emerges as a not very distant possibility thanks to the
explosion of scientific knowledge. We are now, perhaps grudgingly,
coming to terms with the fact that within a very short time, maybe
within a life span, we will be capable of altering ourselves and our
environment in inconceivable ways. The world as we now know it is
bound to undergo dramatic changes in all of its aspects.

An observer may wonder in what ways this new world of radical
opportunities is related with the ongoing process of globalisation,
militant counter-globalisation activists, and open source development.
!!!!!! It has everything to do with them because all these powerful
21st century technologies that fuel the world of radical opportunities
can do either enormous good or unprecedented harm if left to the
devices of for-profit organisations, corrupt governments, and
unscrupulous techno-elites. Consider the case of the human genome once
again: do you trust the government or commercial organisations to
exploit the human genome? "If the rights to the exploitation of the
human genome were vested in governments and the public sector, many
people would be alarmed. Yet the idea that private companies should be
given ownership over our genes is also disturbing" (Leadbeater
2000:169-170). Thanks to the Human Genome Project and its spectacular
effort, we are fortunate enough to avoid the uneasy position of
contemplating what it would mean if the human genome had not remained
in the public domain. Yet, as Bill Joy cluefully asks in the
(in)famous Why the future doesn't needs us, is the widest possible
dissemination and availability of scientific knowledge adequate in
containing the terror of technotopia? One could only be awed into
silence by the proliferation of technologies and scientific realms
designed to change the definition of life and world. Joy maintains
that research into controversial sciences should be relinquished for
the sake of preserving human life as we now know it, but even if we
assume that such a disengaged course of action is ethical and
desirable (and it is neither as both Max Moore and Francis Fukuyama
(1991), respectively, have argued) , it is nonetheless hardly
feasible. Nevertheless, the danger that scientic knowledge could
spiral out of control to the detriment of humankind remains.

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______________________________________________________________________

[1] Oekonux Project Homepages: http://oekonux.org/ and
http://oekonux.de/

[2] 2nd Oekonux Conference Website:
http://second.oekonux-conference.org/

[3] The workshop was led by Graham Seaman, and its title was "The Two
Economies or why the washing machine question is the wrong answer".
The paper is archived at
http://second.oekonux-conference.org/documentation/texts/Seaman.html
and the sound recording of the workshop is accessible online at
http://audio.oekonux.org/2002/seaman.mp3

[4] Interestingly, a recently released documentary called The
Corporation says exactly that: corporations are psychotic; their greed
and obsessive fixation to profit renders them blind to the extent of
committing corporate suicide; and they should be stopped by all means.

[5] Nologo Website URL: http://www.nologo.org/
[http://www.nologo.org/]

[6] Slash Website URL: http://slashcode.com/ [http://slashcode.com/]

[7] Slashdot Website URL: http://slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/]

[8] Openflows Website URL: http://openflows.org
[http://openflows.org/]

[9] For a more elaborate discussion of Openflows, its business model,
and its relationship to the F/OSS community, see The Search for
Community and Profit: Slashdot and Openflows, in George Dafermos,
Blogging the Market: how Weblogs turn corporate machines into real
conversations, 2003.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0117128/Blogpaper/blogging_the_market.html#the_search_for_community_and_profit_

[10] For an elaborate discussion of marketing as "markets are
conversations", see C. Locke, 2001. Gonzo Marketing: Winning through
worst practices, and R. Levine, D. Searls, D. Weinberger and C. Locke,
2000. The Cluetrain Manifesto: the end of business as usual. In the
context of this paper, this means that the success of Linux and other
F/OSS technologies is not attributed to large corporations' corporate
marketing departments and campaigns but it can be understood as the
outcome of informal communication and free sharing of information on
the Net. Marketers would call it word-of-mouth marketing.

[11] Is anyone who can honestly deny that Silicon Valley and
technology companies were the major growth engine in US and a prime
example of globalisation? Bear in mind that Microsoft and Netscape
Communications software is developed in the US but it is sold and
installed in computers worldwide.

[12] Evidently, releasing the source code for any given technology
substantially helps to avoid market consolidation and fragmentation as
it enables the development of many niche markets rather than assuming
or creating a mass market, but not all OSI-certified licenses require
the release of the source code. Thus, for confusion to be avoided, my
analysis is mostly restricted to the GNU General Public License (GNU
GPL) and does not refer to all licenses that are commonly associated
with F/OS software.

[13] Sharing their view on certain, specific issues does not mean that
I agree with everything they say, do, or stand for. I share their view
that globalisation, when seen as a purely economic construct, is a
process that we'd better foster than destroy. I don't suggest we drift
to an uninterrupted, naively disengaged mode of consciousness. Nor do
I propose that we seek to regress back into some outdated utopian idea
of sovereignty. The potential benefits that accrue to a globally
emancipated society that has put globalisation to work for the common
good outnumber the potential disadvantages emanating from the fragile
process of globalisation. However, the optimism/pessimism dichotomy
may not be the most proper choice, linguistically speaking, in order
to conceptualise and grasp the dynamics of critical discourse
currently underway (thanks to Joanne Richardson for pointing this out
in private email exchange). Unfortunately, in the absence of more
appropriate terms and analogies to draw upon, I have chosen to employ
this dichotomy throughout the text.

[14] Charles Leadbeater's Up the Down Escalator provided me with the
most excellent analysis I have come across of the current state of
globalisation, as well as with a framework which I have adopted too
for researching and writing this paper. And George Soros's On
Globalization is also a very useful resource for a number of reasons:
it is practical; the solutions and fixes it prescribes are obviously
viable from an economic and political perspective; and it is the only
book that puts forth such an elaborate and detailed economic proposal
for the provision of public goods on a global scale. Although many
people are skeptical of Soros's real motives for colonizing the NGO
space with his panoply of global philanthropy - taking shape through
his Open Society Institute - this is by no means an argument
sufficient to downplay the merit of his very valuable book.

[15] Quoted in Po Bronson, The Nudist on the Late Shift, pp. 170.

[16] Nor do I seek to reinvigorate the hallucinogenic euphoria that
charactrerised this era - in fact, I sympathise with very little
associated with that era, most disturbing remnants of which include
but are not limited to massive unsolicited commercial email, vibrant
public spaces turned ghost towns, free cultural hyperdromes gone dry
when the gold-diggers flung to other adventurous gigs. However, and
despite the considerably spreading tendency among Net critics to
denounce everything that the New Economy social epidemic stood for as
a winner-takes-all casino game, a neo-liberal colonization of the
public domain by commercial agendas and governments flirting with the
idea of resurrecting Big Brother, I believe the New Economy
represented something more than mere greed, stupidity,
short-sightedness, arrogance, corporate takeover, and hubris. The
rhythm of life during those years in Silicon Valley (despite the
blatant differences in the practices employed by different clusters of
actors in regions and countries where the New economy media virus
found fertile ground to grow), as most vividly documented in Po
Bronson's the Nudist on the Late Shift, for all its shortcomings and
problems, also reveals a passionate, networked work ethic premised
upon changing the world through the synergy of vision and technology;
building a world that values the pursuit of one's dream more than
economic success.

[17] During my presentation at the 3rd Oekonux conference in Vienna
(May 2004), Graham Seaman offered that Lancashire's conclusions are
not corresponding to the actual economic climate since the data he
used for his analysis were taken from the period commonly associated
with the dot.com era, and are thus insufficient to describe the
post-dot.com economic environment we are now facing. I agree with
everything Graham Seaman said, but, I, nevertheless, continue to
postulate that the majority of F/OSS developers tunnel their labour
pains where market opportunities gravitate.

[18] Various bus-models, sell as product, sell services, in-house
deployment see E.S. Raymond The Magic Couldron, Version 3.0, 2000, at
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cauldron/

[19] The concept originates in Schumpeter's view of the process of
ecomomic change.

[20] Police forces removed mobile phones during the 2000 protest of
the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia wiki

[21] According to Naomi Klein (2003), Pablo Ortellado (2003), and
Peter Waterman (2003), the most severe danger lies from within. During
the 2003 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the big old boys
(leaders of traditional leftist political parties and their entourage)
tried to manipulate the movement.

[22] The counter-globalisation movement can be said to be leaderless,
however, several individuals such as Geert Lovink and Florian
Schneider, to name but only two of them, are very visible and enjoy a
certain degree of leverage over the direction the movement (or the
network if you prefer) will walk through. Similarly, the network of
independent media centers known as Indymedia effectively directs the
protests, so we could identify and locate a nucleus of power and
leadership within the constellation of individuals that govern those
Indymedia sites. As regards to the particular role of Indymedia in the
counter-globalisation movement and its intersection with the F/OSS
community, see the next section of this paper where there is a more
elaborate discussion.

[23] Of course, not everyone sees this multiplicity of opinions that
are expressed through the anti-movement as a necessary contradiction,
an unfortunate downside of diversity that further breeds pessimism.
Indeed, Negri and Hardt (2000) and Immanuel Wallerstein (1999) see it
as an advantage, or to put it properly, Negri and Hardt claim that
this multiplicity of voices is inevitable because the realm of
exploitation has been extended to encompass all of life. Since, for
example, the current organs of control oppress all classes, and the
appropriation of surplus value is no longer confined to the factory
floor, the mental coordinates of conflict originate in far more places
than generally associated with labour struggle. If seen from this
vantage point, the anti-movement's agenda is not unstructured at all -
on the contrary, the agenda is very well structured to encompass all
of life, demanding change in the ways we communicate, travel, work,
play, modify our bodies and lead our lives. It should be noted too
that others, like Geert Lovink (2003), don't even acknowledge what
others see as a non-existent agenda of debate. Lovink believes that
post-1999/post-Seattle tactical media, which he positions at the core
of the anti-movement, are putting forth a very clear and specific set
of issues that ought to be addressed.

[24] Geert Lovink says exactly the opposite: "Barlow called on
governments not to interfere and let the Internet alone, thereby
opening the door for corporate rule" (Lovink 2003: 153). I agree that
this is what Barlow wrote, but I disagree with Lovink's
interpretation. Draw your own conclusions.

[25] Quoted in Borsook 1992

[26] Benjamin Mako Hill in Software, Politics, and Indymedia, says
that no technical decision is made at indymedia without careful
consideration of its political implications, and the software that
each indymedia node chooses represents the node's own political stand.

[27] Paul Graham makes the same argument in Hackers and Painters, and
the Minciu Sodas laboratory (Kulikauskas et al. 2004) has painted a
rather favourable and positive image of the social hacker, shunning
any references to notorious practices of 'social engineering' and
moving closer to the positively curious and talkative person who
constantly forges and cements new relationships, sort of like playing
the role of a mediator and/or connector among disparate social nodes.

[28] Himanen constructs his argument on top of the widely respected
dichotomy between the hacker as a distinctive computer scientist and
the cracker as a computer user penetrating systems with a malicious
intent. According to this dichotomy, real hackers are unjustly equated
with crackers by mainstream mass media, and the negative image of the
hacker, as perceived by the general public due to tactics of
disinformation, or insufficient reporting, lacks a basis in reality.
However, Lovink (2003) sees this dichotomy as naïve and strikingly
irrelevant to begin with; as an effort made by computer enthusiasts to
romanticize the actual contemporary identity of the hacker. Writes
Lovink: "People wake up from the libertarian consensus dream of the
neutral, positive hacker ethic. Unlike Pekka Himanen in the Hacker
Ethic, I believe that the distinction between good hackers and bad
crackers, endlessly reproduced by mainstream media, is a thing of the
past. There is more to hackers than their 'post-Protestant work
ethic', as Himanen classifies them. A polarization is becoming visible
between those sticking to the outworn New Economy tales of 'good
capitalism' and others, questioning the free market a priori ...Being
both hacker and activist is no longer a contradiction" (2003: 16-17).
I agree with both Lovink and Himanen, but not completely, nor do I
feel that their views are mutually exclusive and as divergent as
Lovink suggests. As a matter of fact, this dichotomy, like any other,
hinders our understanding of the actual contemporary composition of
the hacker identity. For certain, there are hordes of
hackers-activists who understand their involvement in politics and
society as a positive trait of the 'hacker archetype', and thus one
can find a strong sense of social justification in their actions, even
though those very actions may prove harmful to certain entities toward
which they are aimed. In a similar vein, the image of the hacker as a
neutral scientist who consciously chooses to assume that the
advancement of science should be pursued for the sake of science
without any consideration of its future social consequences is still
preserved and reinforced, not so much by mass media as one would
expect, but instead by leaders of the hacker community.
Characteristically, in a heated debate at the Linux kernel mailing
list (April 23, 2003. at
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=105115686114064&w=2 See
also Slashdot 2003, Linux Weekly News 2003, Orlowski 2003) over the
impact of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies on the Linux
operating system, and how the Linux community should respond to the
computer industry's effort to push DRM into Linux, the undisputed
leader of the Linux community - Linus Torvalds - stated that the Linux
development community should not be overly occupied with politics and
business as, like he said, "I'm just an engineer". At this point, it
is worth recalling that the scientist most widely credited with the
development of the atomic bomb - Frank (Robert?) Oppenheimer - had
used exactly the same phrase (perhaps in a slightly apologetic tone?)
in order to explain the reasons that got him involved in the
development of the atomic bomb. Since then [atomic bomb], and in the
wake of a potential nuclear winter, numerous scientists have denounced
the pursuit of pure science (for instance, see Alain Jaubert and
Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond, (Auto)critique de la Science ; Georges
Politzer, Elementary Principles of Philosophy; and Bill Joy, Why the
Future Doesn't Need Us), however, this mindset has not eclipsed among
science and technology circles. It should also be noted that various
highly-regarded economists have long been arguing that scientists
should assume responsibility for the wider consequences of science and
technology. See J.K. Galbraith, 1974, pp. 377.

[29] The series of leaked Halloween documents also demonstrate that
this love and hate relationship is a two-way thing.

[30] Also see the interview with Stefan Merten by Joanne Richardson,
"Free Software and GPL Society", Subsol, November 2001, at
http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/mertentext.html and the
interview with Stefan Merten by Geert Lovink, Nettime, April 24, 2001,
at
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0104/msg00127.html

[31] See Felix Stalder, Six Limitations to the Current Open Source
Development Methodology.

[32] Richard Barbrook in The High-Tech Gift Economy and Dan Barber in
The Open Source Development Model: is it applicable to other
industries? make the same claim.

[33] Chris Parry (2003) has written a brilliant review of the
Corporation that manages to capture all the energy of the documentary.
Robert Paterson (2004) has also written a compulsive review. See also
Alexandra Gill (2004) for another review. In addition, the documentary
is accompanied by a similarly titled book, "The Corporation: The
Pathological Pursuit of Power", by Joel Bakan. See
http://thecorporation.tv/

[34] The quote is from Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium, an
interview with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Sylvere Lothringer
(Ed. Chaosophy, Autonomedia/Semiotexte. 1995). Also posted on Nettime
(April 21, 1996) at
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9604/msg00025.html

[35] Excluding Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guittari, Jeremy Rifkin, Guy Debord, and the Internationale
Situationists (Thomas Friedman ?).

[36] It is interesting to note that until the early 1960s it would
have been unthinkable, if not 'dangerous', for a Western organisation
, entrepreneur, or economist to suggest that (corporate) philanthropy
and caring for the public should be part of an organisation's goals.
This thesis is compellingly expressed in a widely read 1958 Harvard
Business Review article by Theodor Levitt where any commitments by
for-profit organisations to the common good are seen as an external
interference with real social welfare, and as such, they are condemned
by the prevailing orthodox economic logic of the time. Writes Levitt
(1958: 44-49): "The function of business is to produce sustained
high-level profits. The essence of free enterprise is to go after
profit in any way that is consistent with its own survival...It should
let government take care of the general welfare". Seen from a wider
economic and historic perspective, this view is consistent with the
then unquestionable economic theory of motivation at the center of
which sits the assumption that the main goal of organisations (and of
those in power within organisations) is to maximize their own personal
profit. Around the early 1960s this conception started to falter with
various organisations proclaiming that their goals extended well
beyond profit maximization. For a thorough discussion of this shift in
corporate behaviour and its economic significance for the capitalist
industrial system, see J.K. Galbraith, The New Industrial System
(especially chapters 10-14). It should also be noted that nowadays
corporate philanthropy is regarded as a natural and integral component
of corporate behaviour; and the Stakeholder Theory of the Firm, which
appeared in the early 1990s and is now practically unshaken, reflects
this shift in corporate governance models away from an excessive
fixation upon shareholders toward greater (corporate) social
responsibility. For a comprehensive account of the Stakeholder Theory
see T. Clarke and S. Clegg, Changing Paradigms: the transformation of
management knowledge for the 21st century (Chapter 6: Stakeholders),
and D. Wheeler and M. Sillanpaaa, The Stakeholder Corporation. Of
course, this shift is also reflected in marketing theory and practice,
particularly in the branches of cause-related marketing, green
marketing, and social marketing.

[37] This is, of course, not a novel claim among economists. As early
as of 1970, Paul A. Samuelson wrote: "the consumer is, so to speak,
the king...each is a voter who uses his votes to get things done that
he wants done".

[38] For an elaborate discussion of the role played by Linux User
Groups within the overall Linux community, as well as an extended
profiling of the Finnish Linux User Group (FLUG), see Jussi Silvonen
and Reijo Miettinen, Linux and Linux Community: Perspectives and
Points of View, University of Helsinki Workshop on Linux and F/OSS,
2002.

[39] For instance, Ruben Safir, President of the New York Linux Scene
(NYLX), is an ardent supporter of that view.

[40] See Tim O'Reilly, 2001. pp.42-44. EXPLAIN

[41] See Glyn Moody

[42] Of course, this view is based on the assumption that every piece
of software deployed in the world will be FS/OSS, and this, beyond
doubt, is an assumption prone to error. The reason is twofold: first,
such a scenario is definitely hard to materialize and even harder to
predict with any degree of certainty. In addition, there is no
guarantee that anything at all would be different were free software
to be installed in all computers worldwide without a corresponding
change in the dominant system of beliefs, values, and attitudes. See
G. Seaman 2004.

[43] See also C. Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and
Manufactures, p.12, and K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Foreign
Languages Publishing House, Moscow, pp.132-133.

[44] A skeptic may argue that programmers rely upon certain tools
(compilers, debuggers, editors, etc.) to develop programs, therefore
the machine supersedes the workman, but this view doesn't seem to bear
in mind that the programmer himself can develop those very same tools
he will later use to develop the final product of his effort. Indeed,
Richard M. Stallman, when he started his GNU Project, he first created
the tools he and others would later use to develop parts of what was
meant to become the complete replacement to the Unix operating system.

[45] We arrive at this syllogism by synthesizing two other arguments:
(1) software can, and (depending on its architecture) it does enable a
level of co-operation and co-ordination that was thought to be
unattainable before the advent of the Internet; and (2) co-operation
is immanent to labour and not subject to capital's dynamics (Negri and
Hardt 2000). So, by fusing (1) and (2) we also come to assume that:
(3) software regulates behaviour, and it, thus, exerts influence over
the terrain of co-operation; and (4) by compromising software, one
will deliver a strong blow to the multitude's ability to co-operate;
and (5) software, hence, lies at the annex of the empire and its
nemesis. Software is a domain of conflict.

[46] A knowledge worker manages information that is beheld by people,
not people. Knowledge work consists in managing and creating new
repositories of knowledge through a circle of production that
transforms data to information to knowledge.

[47] Pasquinelli (2004) recognises this too.

[48] For instance, see Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution; Tom Peters,
Liberation Management; Charles Handy, The Age of Unreason and The
Empty Raincoat

[49] For a compelling justification of this argument, see George
Orwell, Second Thoughts on James Burnham.

[50] Even though George Orwell launched a powerful and
well-substantiated critique against Burnham's theories in 1946, at
least insofar as the latter's political predictions were concerned, he
went about to situate Burnham's protagonist at the epicentre of his
1984 dystopia, published in 1949. 1984 is the world of Burnham's
manager.

[51] Translated from Greek by the author.

[52] http://space.frot.org/mudlondon.html. I have also come across an
interesting weblog post about MudLondon at
http://www.locative.org/archives/000227.html

[53] See also "Do we need social software?" at
http://radio.weblogs.com/[PHONE NUMBER REMOVED]/01/19.html#a169 for my personal
vision of what MudLondon could become if, or when, combined with other
Semantic Web technologies, especially FOAF.

[54] http://vax.area.com/marc/indyvoter.html

[55] http://vax.area.com/marc/indyvoter/requirements.html


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