Christopher M. Kelty is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rice University.

Two Bits

THE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF FREE SOFTWAREBy CHRISTOPHER M. KELTY

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4242-7

Contents

Preface…………………………………………………………..ixAcknowledgments……………………………………………………xiiiIntroduction………………………………………………………11. Geeks and Recursive Publics………………………………………272. Protestant Reformers, Polymaths, Transhumanists…………………….643. The Movement……………………………………………………974. Sharing Source Code……………………………………………..1185. Conceiving Open Systems………………………………………….1436. Writing Copyright Licenses……………………………………….1797. Coordinating Collaborations………………………………………2108. “If We Succeed, We Will Disappear”………………………………..2439. Reuse, Modification, and the Nonexistence of Norms………………….269Conclusion: The Cultural Consequences of Free Software…………………301Notes…………………………………………………………….311Bibliography………………………………………………………349Index…………………………………………………………….367

Chapter One

Geeks and Recursive Publics

Since about 1997, I have been living with geeks online and off. I have been drawn from Boston to Bangalore to Berlin to Houston to Palo Alto, from conferences and workshops to launch parties, pubs, and Internet Relay Chats (IRCs). All along the way in my research questions of commitment and practice, of ideology and imagination have arisen, even as the exact nature of the connections between these people and ideas remained obscure to me: what binds geeks together? As my fieldwork pulled me from a Boston start-up company that worked with radiological images to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurial elites in Bangalore, my logistical question eventually developed into an analytical concept: geeks are bound together as a recursive public.

How did I come to understand geeks as a public constituted around the technical and moral ideas of order that allow them to associate with one another? Through this question, one can start to understand the larger narrative of Two Bits: that of Free Software as an exemplary instance of a recursive public and as a set of practices that allow such publics to expand and spread. In this chapter I describe, ethnographically, the diverse, dispersed, and novel forms of entanglements that bind geeks together, and I construct the concept of a recursive public in order to explain these entanglements.

A recursive public is a public that is constituted by a shared concern for maintaining the means of association through which they come together as a public. Geeks find affinity with one another because they share an abiding moral imagination of the technical infrastructure, the Internet, that has allowed them to develop and maintain this affinity in the first place. I elaborate the concept of recursive public (which is not a term used by geeks) in relation to theories of ideology, publics, and public spheres and social imaginaries. I illustrate the concept through ethnographic stories and examples that highlight geeks’ imaginations of the technical and moral order of the Internet. These stories include those of the fate of Amicas, a Boston-based healthcare start-up, between 1997 and 2003, of my participation with new media academics and activists in Berlin in 1999-2001, and of the activities of a group of largely Bangalore-based information technology (IT) professionals on and offline, especially concerning the events surrounding the peer-to-peer file sharing application Napster in 2000-2001.

The phrase “moral and technical order” signals both technology-principally software, hardware, networks, and protocols-and an imagination of the proper order of collective political and commercial action, that is, how economy and society should be ordered collectively. Recursive publics are just as concerned with the moral order of markets as they are with that of commons; they are not anticommercial or antigovernment. They exist independent of, and as a check on, constituted forms of power, which include markets and corporations. Unlike other concepts of a public or of a public sphere, “recursive public” captures the fact that geeks’ principal mode of associating and acting is through the medium of the Internet, and it is through this medium that a recursive public can come into being in the first place. The Internet is not itself a public sphere, a public, or a recursive public, but a complex, heterogeneous infrastructure that constitutes and constrains geeks’ everyday practical commitments, their ability to “become public” or to compose a common world. As such, their participation qua recursive publics structures their identity as creative and autonomous individuals. The fact that the geeks described here have been brought together by mailing lists and e-mail, bulletin-board services and Web sites, books and modems, air travel and academia, and cross-talking and cross-posting in ways that were not possible before the Internet is at the core of their own reasoning about why they associate with each other. They are the builders and imaginers of this space, and the space is what allows them to build and imagine it.

Why recursive? I call such publics recursive for two reasons: first, in order to signal that this kind of public includes the activities of making, maintaining, and modifying software and networks, as well as the more conventional discourse that is thereby enabled; and second, in order to suggest the recursive “depth” of the public, the series of technical and legal layers-from applications to protocols to the physical infrastructures of waves and wires-that are the subject of this making, maintaining, and modifying. The first of these characteristics is evident in the fact that geeks use technology as a kind of argument, for a specific kind of order: they argue about technology, but they also argue through it. They express ideas, but they also express infrastructures through which ideas can be expressed (and circulated) in new ways. The second of these characteristics-regarding layers-is reflected in the ability of geeks to immediately see connections between, for example, Napster (a user application) and TCP/IP (a network protocol) and to draw out implications for both of them. By connecting these layers, Napster comes to represent the Internet in miniature. The question of where these layers stop (hardware? laws and regulations? physical constants? etc.) circumscribes the limits of the imagination of technical and moral order shared by geeks.

Above all, “recursive public” is a concept-not a thing. It is intended to make distinctions, allow comparison, highlight salient features, and relate two diverse kinds of things (the Internet and Free Software) in a particular historical context of changing relations of power and knowledge. The stories in this chapter (and throughout the book) give some sense of how geeks interact and what they do technically and legally, but the concept of a recursive public provides a way of explaining why geeks (or people involved in Free Software or its derivatives) associate with one another, as well as a way of testing whether other similar cases of contemporary, technologically mediated affinity are similarly structured.

From the Facts of Human Activity

Boston, May 2003. Starbucks. Sean and Adrian are on their way to pick me up for dinner. I’ve already had too much coffee, so I sit at the window reading the paper. Eventually Adrian calls to find out where I am, I tell him, and he promises to show up in fifteen minutes. I get bored and go outside to wait, watch the traffic go by. More or less right on time (only post-dotcom is Adrian ever on time), Sean’s new blue VW Beetle rolls into view. Adrian jumps out of the passenger seat and into the back, and I get in. Sean has been driving for a little over a year. He seems confident, cautious, but meanders through the streets of Cambridge. We are destined for Winchester, a township on the Charles River, in order to go to an Indian restaurant that one of Sean’s friends has recommended. When I ask how they are doing, they say, “Good, good.” Adrian offers, “Well, Sean’s better than he has been in two years.” “Really?” I say, impressed.

Sean says, “Well, happier than at least the last year. I, well, let me put it this way: forgive me father for I have sinned, I still have unclean thoughts about some of the upper management in the company, I occasionally think they are not doing things in the best interest of the company, and I see them as self-serving and sometimes wish them ill.” In this rolling blue confessional Sean describes some of the people who I am familiar with whom he now tries very hard not to think about. I look at him and say, “Ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers, and you will be absolved, my child.” Turning to Adrian, I ask, “And what about you?” Adrian continues the joke: “I, too, have sinned. I have reached the point where I can see absolutely nothing good coming of this company but that I can keep my investments in it long enough to pay for my children’s college tuition.” I say, “You, my son, I cannot help.” Sean says, “Well, funny thing about tainted money … there just taint enough of it.”

I am awestruck. When I met Sean and Adrian, in 1997, their start-up company, Amicas, was full of spit, with five employees working out of Adrian’s living room and big plans to revolutionize the medical-imaging world. They had connived to get Massachusetts General Hospital to install their rudimentary system and let it compete with the big corporate sloths that normally stalked back offices: General Electric, Agfa, Siemens. It was these behemoths, according to Sean and Adrian, that were bilking hospitals and healthcare providers with promises of cure-all technologies and horribly designed “silos,” “legacy systems,” and other closed-system monsters of corporate IT harkening back to the days of IBM mainframes. These beasts obviously did not belong to the gleaming future of Internet-enabled scalability. By June of 2000, Amicas had hired new “professional” management, moved to Watertown, and grown to about a hundred employees. They had achieved their goal of creating an alternative Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) for use in hospital radiology departments and based on Internet standards.

At that point, in the spring of 2000, Sean could still cheerfully introduce me to his new boss-the same man he would come to hate, inasmuch as Sean hates anyone. But by 2002 he was frustrated by the extraordinary variety of corner-cutting and, more particularly, by the complacency with which management ignored his recommendations and released software that was almost certainly going to fail later, if not sooner. Sean, who is sort of permanently callow about things corporate, could find no other explanation than that the new management was evil.

But by 2003 the company had succeeded, having grown to more than 200 employees and established steady revenue and a stable presence throughout the healthcare world. Both Sean and Adrian were made rich-not wildly rich, but rich enough-by its success. In the process, however, it also morphed into exactly what Sean and Adrian had created it in order to fight: a slothlike corporate purveyor of promises and broken software. Promises Adrian had made and software Sean had built. The failure of Amicas to transform healthcare was a failure too complex and technical for most of America to understand, but it rested atop the success of Amicas in terms more readily comprehensible: a growing company making profit. Adrian and Sean had started the company not to make money, but in order to fix a broken healthcare system; yet the system stayed broken while they made money.

In the rolling confessional, Sean and Adrian did in fact see me, however jokingly, as a kind of redeemer, a priest (albeit of an order with no flock) whose judgment of the affairs past was essential to their narration of their venture as a success, a failure, or as an unsatisfying and complicated mixture of both. I thought about this strange moment of confession, of the combination of recognition and denial, of Adrian’s new objectification of the company as an investment opportunity, and of Sean’s continuing struggle to make his life and his work harmonize in order to produce good in the world. Only the promise of the next project, the next mission (and the ostensible reason for our dinner meeting) could possibly have mitigated the emotional disaster that their enterprise might otherwise be. Sean’s and Adrian’s endless, arcane fervor for the promise of new technologies did not cease, even given the quotidian calamities these technologies leave in their wake. Their faith was strong, and continuously tested.

Adrian’s and Sean’s passion was not for money-though money was a powerful drug-it was for the Internet: for the ways in which the Internet could replace the existing infrastructure of hospitals and healthcare providers, deliver on old promises of telemedicine and teleradiology, and, above all, level a playing field systematically distorted and angled by corporate and government institutions that sought secrecy and private control, and stymied progress. In healthcare, as Adrian repeatedly explained to me, this skewed playing field was not only unfair but malicious and irresponsible. It was costing lives. It slowed the creation and deployment of technologies and solutions that could lower costs and thus provide more healthcare for more people. The Internet was not part of the problem; it was part of the solution to the problems that ailed 1990s healthcare.

At the end of our car trip, at the Indian restaurant in Winchester, I learned about their next scheme, a project called MedCommons, which would build on the ideals of Free Software and give individuals a way to securely control and manage their own healthcare data. The rhetoric of commons and the promise of the Internet as an infrastructure dominated our conversation, but the realities of funding and the question of whether MedCommons could be pursued without starting another company remained unsettled. I tried to imagine what form a future confession might take.

Geeks and Their Internets

Sean and Adrian are geeks. They are entrepreneurs and idealists in different ways, a sometimes paradoxical combination. They are certainly obsessed with technology, but especially with the Internet, and they clearly distinguish themselves from others who are obsessed with technology of just any sort. They aren’t quite representative-they do not stand in for all geeks-but the way they think about the Internet and its possibilities might be. Among the rich story of their successes and failures, one might glimpse the outlines of a question: where do their sympathies lie? Who are they with? Who do they recognize as being like them? What might draw them together with other geeks if not a corporation, a nation, a language, or a cause? What binds these two geeks to any others?

Sean worked for the Federal Reserve in the 1980s, where he was introduced to UNIX, C programming, EMACS, Usenet, Free Software, and the Free Software Foundation. But he was not a Free Software hacker; indeed, he resisted my attempts to call him a hacker at all. Nevertheless, he started a series of projects and companies with Adrian that drew on the repertoire of practices and ideas familiar from Free Software, including their MedCommons project, which was based more or less explicitly in the ideals of Free Software. Adrian has a degree in medicine and in engineering, and is a serial entrepreneur, with Amicas being his biggest success-and throughout the last ten years has attended all manner of conferences and meetings devoted to Free Software, Open Source, open standards, and so on, almost always as the lone representative from healthcare. Both graduated from the MIT (Sean in economics, Adrian in engineering), one of the more heated cauldrons of the Internet and the storied home of hackerdom, but neither were MIT hackers, nor even computer-science majors.

Their goals in creating a start-up rested on their understanding of the Internet as an infrastructure: as a standardized infrastructure with certain extremely powerful properties, not the least of which was its flexibility. Sean and Adrian talked endlessly about open systems, open standards, and the need for the Internet to remain open and standardized. Adrian spoke in general terms about how it would revolutionize healthcare; Sean spoke in specific terms about how it structured the way Amicas’s software was being designed and written. Both participated in standards committees and in the online and offline discussions that are tantamount to policymaking in the Internet world. The company they created was a “virtual” company, that is, built on tools that depended on the Internet and allowed employees to manage and work from a variety of locations, though not without frustration, of course: Sean waited years for broadband access in his home, and the hospitals they served hemmed themselves in with virtual private networks, intranets, and security firewalls that betrayed the promises of openness that Sean and Adrian heralded.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Two Bitsby CHRISTOPHER M. KELTY Copyright © 2008 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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