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Roots Culture: Free Software Vibrations "inna Babylon" ======================================================
by Armin Medosch
In this article I want to focus on free software as a culture. My
first reason for doing so is to make it very clear that there is a
difference between open source and free software, a difference that
goes beyond the important distinction made by Richard Stallman. [1]
His ideas have grown legs and now the notion of free software (with
'free' as in 'freedom') has been taken further in ways he could not
have imagined. Second, I want to show that at least a specific part
of the free software scene shows all the traits of a culture; this is understood by protagonists of the scene and is made explicit through
the way they act. With software development rooted in culture, it
becomes a discipline distinct from engineering, and is invested with
social and cultural values.
Rasta Roots and the 'Root' in Computing
=======================================
The first part of the title, 'Roots Culture', is designed to resonate
with the hacker pride of being 'root' on a Unix system, and with
Rastafarian reggae 'roots' culture. In a file system, root is the
uppermost directory, the one from where all other sub-directories
originate. In Unix-style operating systems (including GNU/Linux),
'root' is also the name of the super-user account, the user who has
all rights in all modes and who can set up and administrate other
accounts. Roots reggae is a specific type of reggae music with heavy
bass lines and African rhythmical influences.
Roots reggae originated in Jamaica, and is closely associated with
Rastafari. This is sometimes described as either a sect/religion, or
a subculture, but neither of these definitions can fully do justice
to the diversity of this phenomenon. Therefore it is better to
follow Paul Gilroy who suggests that Rastafari be understood as a
popular movement whose "language and symbols have been put to a broad
and diverse use". [2] It originated in Jamaica in the 1930s, and took
some inspiration from the black nationalism, PanAfricanism and
Ethiopianism of Marcus Garvey. Through Rastafari, the African
Caribbean working class found a way of fermenting resistance to the
continued legacy of colonialism, racism and capitalist exploitation.
It is eclectic and culturally hybrid, drawing from a range of
influences such as African drumming styles, African traditions in
agriculture, food and social organisation, [3] and American Black
music styles such as R&B and soul. The central trope of the
Rastafari narrative is that the Rastas are the 12th tribe of Judah,
living in captivity in Babylon, and longing to go back to Africa,
identified as a mythical Ethiopia.
Paul Gilroy (borrowing a phrase from Edward Said) describes Rastas as
an "interpretive community". The ideas and stories of Rastafari
"brought philosophical and historical meaning to individual and
collective action". [4] Through the enormous success of reggae as a
form of popular music, particularly the work of Bob Marley and the
Wailers, Rastafari became popular throughout the world in the 1970s;
now, many non-Jamaicans sport Rasta hairstyles and dreadlocks, and
dedicate themselves to the music and the activity of ganja smoking.
In the UK, versions of Rasta culture now span all ages and
ethnicities; [5] it is probably, by consensus, the most popular
subculture in Britain today. Aspects of it have been heavily
commercialised and roots reggae has therefore been unfashionable for
a while. It has, however, made a strong comeback recently. The
reason for this can only be that it is more than a music style or a
fashion (not everybody with dreadlocks is a Rasta and not every Rasta
wears 'dreads'): it is a culture in a true and deep sense (the
meaning of which I will come back to later). 'Roots' influences can
now be found in hip-hop, jungle, drum & bass, 2Step and other forms
of contemporary urban music.
Both notions, the 'roots' in computing and in Rastafari, are not to
be understood in any literal or narrow meaning, but as points of
association and affinity. Knotted together, the two narrations form
a crucial potential point of departure for the radical social
imaginary. [6] Neither Rastafari nor hacker cultures are without
problems of their own. Rastafari, for instance, is a very male
culture, where homophobia is rife and women suffer a subordinated
role in the midst of a supposed liberation struggle. [7] I have
chosen the Rastafari theme for a number of reasons. The main one is
that it has developed a language of revolution which it uses to very effectively recount, judging from the massive reception it has got so
far, stories about political resistance and the struggle for freedom,
peace and justice. These accounts have resonated far beyond Jamaica
and the urban African Caribbean communities in the US and Britain.
Roots reggae, as music and as a liberatory mythmaking machine, has a
huge influence in Africa and Latin America.
Rastafari lends itself to be adopted by other communities and
cultures due to its eclectic and hybrid nature. The experience of
diaspora, central to the Rastafari story, is shared by many people
who feel displaced and uprooted. This is understood well by some of
the musical protagonists of roots music, who encourage 'togetherness'
of all people who feel alienated in the societies where they live.
In the words of Humble Lion from the Aba Shanti Sound System from
south London: "Ultimately, people who are like us, who hold similar
attitudes, will gravitate towards us, because we are aiming for the
same virtues that they are, and this creates a something a lot better
than what society stands for. Right now, it's obvious that our
societies are controlled by money, polarised, xenophobic. The major
world powers back their puppet leaders and the media sanitises,
separates 'spectators' from reality. [...] I have to say that now it
is not only the black youths who are suffering in this land, so to
me, increasingly, the true inner meaning of Rasta is not concerned
with colour". [8]
Hackers, young and old, have their own reasons to feel alienated in
society, one of which is the misrepresentation of their creed in the
media. Originally 'hacking' meant nothing else but feeling
impassioned about writing software to the extent of pursuing this
interest sometimes outside the norms, which would not necessarily
imply anything illegal. The original 'hackers' such as Richard
Stallman were employees of research institutions like the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) anyway, so they could
hardly be seen as being outside the state system. But during the
1980s, in the course of the boom in computer science research
(sponsored by the military pursuing projects such as Strategic
Missile Defense and Artificial Intelligence), [9] the mood in these
research ivory towers, which had been fairly liberal in the 1970s,
changed. Mavericks like Stallman left, and hackers outside the state-sanctioned system were increasingly perceived as a potential
threat to national security.
From the mid-1980s onwards, secret services and other law enforcement
agencies started their 'war against hacking', with a compliant mass
media doing their best to stigmatise hackers as criminals, or even as terrorists. [10] With the mass adoption of the Internet in the 1990s,
a new breed of hacker emerged, so-called 'script kiddies', who did
not have to develop deep knowledge of computers because hacking tools
had become relatively easily obtainable. Script kiddies, not
considered 'real' hackers but instead called 'crackers', have
developed an obsession with breaking into web servers, obtaining
'root' privileges and inscribing digital graffiti on the web server's
homepage. This activity served as legitimation for the strengthening
of the legal regime, and allowed centrally owned mass media to
continue, in full force, their denouncement of computer subcultures
in general. Welcome to Babylon!
Hacker Ethics
=============
I do not want to enter into a discussion here of what 'true' hackers
are, especially since the factional infighting between hackers
sometimes rages over topics such as which 'free' version of BSD is
the better or 'truer' one, which seems rather pointless to the
noninitiated. [11] Nevertheless, a common theme can be identified
that transcends internal schisms in the hacker community. Most
hackers share an ethical code in relation to computers and networks.
Central to this ethical code is that hackers do not disrupt the flow
of information and do not destroy data. It is not my intention to
idealise hackers as freedom fighters of the information age, but it
must be said that their ethics stand in marked contrast to the
behaviour of the state and certain industries who do their best to
erect barriers, disrupt communication flows and enclose data by
various means, including threats of breaking into the computers of
users who participate in file-sharing networks. This hacker ethic
has been a shared commitment to a 'live and let live principle'. It
is an ethos that is born out of love for the craft of hacking and the
desire to let as many people as possible benefit from the sources of
knowledge. Hackers do not represent one homogenous community; they
are split and divided into many subgroups, but are united in that for
them hacking is more than just writing code. It is a way of life, it
has its own politics and it has many characteristics of a culture.
Hacker culture has developed its own ways of speaking, certain types
of 'geek' humour, and even some sort of a dress code. Hackers
regularly meet at conventions (some highly publicised, some more
subterranean) with an atmosphere more resembling a picnic of a large
family or a tribe than any sort of formal 'meeting'. From this point
of view, there are similarities between hackers and Rastafari.
The Hijacking of Free Software
==============================
As Ur-hacker Richard Stallman makes clear whenever he speaks in
public, there is not much difference between 'open source' and 'free'
software in the way the software is developed technically. Most free
and open source software packages are also protected by the same
licence, the General Public Licence (GPL) developed by Stallman with
the support of Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen. Yet,
according to Stallman, there is a profound difference insofar that
'free' software is linked with a political concept of freedom centred
on freedom of speech. The term 'open source' was introduced by a
group of probusiness computer libertarians in direct opposition to
this political position. Eric Raymond and others proposed the use of
the term 'open source' to make the idea of releasing source code and
developing software collaboratively more appealing to American IT
investors. This move by the proponents of open source was
fantastically successful. It opened the way for IPOs of Linux
companies at the height of the new economy boom, and drew the
attention of companies like Sun and IBM to the existence of open
source as a potential antidote to the market dominance of Microsoft.
It is easy to see how open source lends itself to be adopted by
businesses much more easily than free software. Open source gained
the support of the industry and of many software developers who
mainly want to be able to make a living from their programming
skills. Many open source developers make it very clear that they see themselves as engineers and engineers only; that they have no
interest in politics and are glad to leave that to the politicians.
Since the launch of the open source bandwagon, Richard Stallman has
been on a kind of a mission to remind the world that free software is
about 'free' as in free speech "and not free as in beer". He also
keeps reminding us that the Linux kernel could not have been written
without the GNU tools and libraries, and therefore it should always
be called GNU/Linux. However, Stallman's style of oratory and his
evangelical zeal do not appeal to everyone. The promotion of the
type of freedom that is implied with free software needs support. It
benefits from being linked to other social concepts of freedom.
The Whitewash: Hegemonic Computer and Internet Discourse and the ================================================================
Denial of Difference
====================
Constructions of race in the form of mental images are much more
than simple indexes of biological or cultural sameness. They are
the constructs of the social imagination, mapped onto geographical
regions and technological sites. [12]
The predominant social imagination of computer science and the
Internet is a whitewash. This whitewash is the product of an
entanglement of historical developments, the creation of certain
'facts on the ground' and a hegemonic discourse led from the centres
of Western power (which in my definition includes Japan). The
starting point here is the development of Western rationality and
science from the early Renaissance onwards, associated with heroes of
the various scientific revolutions, such as Descartes, Leibnitz,
Newton. Cartesianism, with its positing of an abstract space of
reasoning through which alone the divine rules of nature can be
identified, must bear the brunt of the criticism. [13] As Donna
Haraway has pointed out, the rise of rationalism and the scientific
worldview had, from the very beginning, negative dialectics inscribed
into it:
... I remember that anti-Semitism and misogyny intensified in the
Renaissance and Scientific Revolution of early modern Europe, that
racism and colonialism flourished in the travelling habits of the cosmopolitan Enlightenment, and that the intensified misery of
billions of men and women seems organically rooted in the freedoms
of transnational capitalism and technoscience. [14]
Computer science has its roots in the military-industrial complex of
the Cold War era. The dominant social imagination was one of
containment, of separating the world into zones of influence by the
United States and the Soviet Union, divided by electronic fences and
locked into each other by the threat of mutual annihilation. Early
computer projects received huge funding increments when it was
recognised that computers could play an indispensable role in air
defence and 'smart' guided ballistic missile systems. [15] The cyborg
discourse of Cold War think-tanks such as Rand Corporation and
research centres like the MIT generated the imaginary signification
of Artificial Intelligence, a brain without a body, a sentient being
that is not born, but is constructed by scientists in the laboratory.
It is easy to see how archaic religious ideas live on in this
'dream' of AI that conducts itself so rationally. [16] The computer
brain has a godlike omni-science. With the Internet conceived in the
same laboratories of the Western scientific elite, sponsored by
Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA), the AI brain grows nerves
that will soon stretch around the globe and, via satellite, would
gain a godlike viewpoint in space, from which earth looks like a
little, fragile blue ball. Omni-science plus omni-presence equals omni-potency, but only just, only maybe, and mostly in the
imagination of the protagonists of this 'vision'.
The Internet, based on Western communication protocols constructed by
Western males, is imagined to be populated mostly by white and
relatively affluent people. This was maybe the case in 1995, when approximately 20 million people used the Internet, but certainly does
not match the true demography of the Net in 2005, with its users
numbering more than 600 million, and the highest growth in numbers in
countries such as China and India. The whitewashed mass media
discourse continues to associate the Net with a Western and
particularly American worldview and an ultra-libertarian,
anti-socialist political programme. The ingrained assumption of a non-gendered, non-ethnically defined cyberspace automatically makes
cyberspace 'white', a colour blindness that is inherently racist.
ACADEMIC TECHNO-TOPIA
=====================
Bobby Reason was born weak from typhus fever and unable to crawl
away from his body of infection. He spends his time passing
voltage through the pathways of least resistance to help him
amplify, copy, and replay sounds. Extending his ears to where his
eyes used to be, he forms lenses to put in place of his
imagination. Whilst doing so he manages to split light and holds
the lower end of the spectrum (radiation) with special tools he
forged out of the Industrial Revolution to replace his hands. And
after all is done, he gets out the air-freshener to replace his
nose. [17]
From the early to mid-1990s, the Internet spawned an elaborate
theoretical discourse about the Net in print form, and to a large
extent, on the Net as well. The more mainstream currents of this
discourse hailed the Net as a force that would bring about a more
democratic and egalitarian world. Unfortunately, again the Net was
imagined as a homogenous zone, free of connotations of gender, race
and class divisions. [18] The only distinction that was identified
was the existence of a 'digital divide': the realisation that the
promise of the Net could not be realised until all people had equal
access to it. The debate around the digital divide was well
intentioned, but catalysed the proliferation of another version of
Western hegemonic thinking with its polarised rhetoric of 'access':
there is the Net, based on open standards, egalitarian, global,
democratic, hard to censor, and 'we' have to give 'those people' down
in Africa or elsewhere access to it. This unilateral, US/Eurocentric
version of Internet 'freedom' did not even attempt to imagine the
possibility that the Net itself could become a more diverse cultural
space, and that even its technical protocols might become
'mongrelised'. The schema of the Internet, narrated as the success
story of Western rationality and the scientific worldview, did not
allow such digressions.
Theoretical Internet discourse very early on embraced open standards,
free software and open source. The principles embodied in the
Internet Protocols and the Gnu General Public Licence (GPL) would
guarantee freedom of expression and communication. The discourse
produced by Internet intellectuals tended towards highlighting
abstract principles enshrined in code. In doing so, the discourse,
by default, prioritised its own inherited values of 500 years of book
culture. American cyber-libertarians even went so far to describe
the space of lived reality by the derogatory term 'meatspace'. The well-meaning left-liberal discourse about the Net found itself in the
classic Cartesian trap of mind-body dualism.
The Internet-left adopted Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) as
a potential saviour from the corporate world, yet by doing so they
followed entrenched, existent patterns of thought. Too often, only
the abstract qualities of FLOSS are highlighted: the 'viral'
character of the GPL, the properties of the Net of being highly
'distributed', the 'meshed network topology' in wireless networking,
the importance of 'copyleft principles'. [19] What gets much less consideration is that those principles and abstract values in and of
themselves don't do anything at all without human agency, without
being embedded in communities who have internalised the values
contained in those acronyms. The proactive making and doing by
humans, in other words 'work', is once more written out of the story.
The desires and passions invested in the writing of programme code
get little 'air time' in FLOSS discourse. In this sense a certain
type of FLOSS discourse can be understood as another prolongation of
the project of modernity, with its preference for abstract reasoning
and the codification of knowledge. The values and norms of society
are formulated as the Bill of Rights or as the Human Rights Charter
of the United Nations, so-called "inalienable" and "universal" rights
and freedoms, but which de facto exist mainly on a piece of paper
that politicians like to quote in Sunday speeches, and which are
quickly forgotten overnight.
The relationship between code as programme code and as an ethical or
legal code, and the importance that it is assigned by Western
societies, is a very broad topic that I cannot explore in detail
here. I will however assert that, generally speaking, putting one's
faith in abstract [20] truth only, one that has cut its ties with
lived reality and become transcendent to society, implies the
creation of a form of absolutism. The divine power of God returns
through the back door into 'rational' discourse. Abstract,
transcendent truth takes away the individual and collective freedom
of people to make their own decisions and subjects them to the rule
of a truth that is already given, independent of history and the
situated-ness of being. [21]
If FLOSS discourse cuts itself off from the roots of lived culture,
it empties itself of all meaning. The 'free' and 'libre' in FLOSS is
not given once and for all by being laid down in the GPL; it is a
freedom that needs to be constantly worked out and given new meanings
by being connected to situations, to concrete social struggles. The
content of this freedom cannot be understood in the abstract, it
needs to be created in the actuality of sensual and bodily existence,
which is, by the way, the only thing that really makes 'sense'. [22]
By following the default patterns of Western rationality, academic
FLOSS discourse risks generating a vacuous fiction, an idealisation
that lacks body, guts, feelings, pain, joy and anything else that
makes life worth living.
Culture and the Social Imaginary
================================
The term 'culture' can subsume all those human activities that are
not directly utilitarian, which do not serve, in a narrow way, the
goal of material survival. Yet at the same time culture is an
indispensable component of human life, without which communities or
societies could not survive. Culture provides the cohesive element
for social groups; it motivates the actions of individuals and groups.
I use the term motivation here not in a trivial sense, as when an
athlete is asked by television sportscasters about what 'motivates'
him or her. What I have in mind is closer to the German word
Leitmotif that roughly translates as 'guiding idea'. But it would be
wrong to imagine those 'motives' as something outside culture or
social reality. They are at the centre of the social life of
societies, anchoring it, but also giving it direction. This concept
of motives is closely related to the concept of values. It would be
wrong to say that something is 'based on' values, because values can
be both implicit and explicit, internal and external. Here we cannot
use architectural metaphors of foundation and superstructure.
Culture is not the only, but clearly one of the most important
forces, behind the creation of values and motivations, of 'making
sense' and 'giving meaning' to our existence. Society, in a constant
state of self-creation, develops social imaginary significations
through cultural feedback loops. In this sense, culture is not just
limited to cultural representations in various media forms, but is
constantly realised in the actions and interactions of everyday life.
Culture 'finds expression' in various ways, in how people dress,
what they eat and how it is prepared, in social protocols and forms
of behaviour. The social and cultural knowledge of a society is
expressed in those forms, in both the patterns of behaviour of
everyday life and in explicit cultural representations.
Unfortunately, Western society has developed a hierarchy of different
forms of knowledge, with hard science at the top, social sciences
somewhere in the middle and culture per se at the bottom. The
positivistic divide claims that what can be described in scientific
language, logic, mathematics, theorems, is the only form of objective knowledge, whereas the rest is regarded as the soft underbelly, as a
somehow lesser form of knowledge. Philosophers and historians of
science have argued that the claims that science progresses only
through rational methods and in logical steps are not true. Many
other factors inform the conduct of scientific research and
development: politics and the economy, cultural and sociological
factors, funding and institutional structures, belief systems and
tacit knowledge. Despite the well known works of authors such as
Kuhn and Feyerabend, and later Latour and Haraway, and an ongoing
investigation into what 'informs' science from many different
viewpoints (anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, etc.), the
results of techno-science are invariably presented as ideologically
neutral and free of contingent forms of social knowledge.
Computer science, which is conventionally understood to be closer to engineering than to basic research, is presenting itself as a hard
science. The conventional views about software development deny the
link between software and culture as something that comes before the
actual creation of the code. Yes, software is understood to
facilitate the production of cultural representations and to
influence culture by the tools that it makes available, but it is
usually not seen to be a product of social imaginary significations.
I have tried to describe the true content of culture as a form of
knowledge, as 'immaterial'. Nevertheless, culture is quite obviously
also 'material' and has various economic aspects. Cultural values
define which objects are desirable, what gets produced and what is
left out. The production of cultural representations is of course a
form of human labour and therefore always includes economic
transactions, independent of the form of the exchange value, if it is
based on money or other forms of exchange. The commodification of
the production of culture in capitalist economies has been criticised
by the Frankfurt School in the early 20th century. Now, at the
beginning of the 21st century, this work, even if some of it is
flawed, [23] gains heightened significance as the commodification of
culture reaches unprecedented levels.
The culture industry has been re-branded as 'creative industry', and
is seen by many governments of overdeveloped countries, particularly
in Britain, as a central plank in government strategies for economic
growth and urban development (i.e., gentrification). Problems are
aggravated by the aggressive conduct of the copyright industries, and
the power of media conglomerates who have become highly integrated
and own production companies, distribution channels and advertising
agencies. Each of these industries has become highly oligopolistic,
even monopolistic, and their combined influence greatly controls what
can be seen or heard, and how it is distributed. New borders have
been created by various means such as copyright, patents or the
gatekeeper functions of communication providers. The exchange and
transmission of cultural knowledge is now in danger of being
interrupted or seriously hampered by those powerful formations. [24]
One could go even further into the darkness of these developments and
predict a closure of the cultural production of social imaginary significations.
I have described two processes: one that excludes cultural knowledge
from the official scientific body of knowledge; and one that encloses
cultural knowledge in the products of the military-entertainment
complex, a.k.a the creative industries. [25] Through both, exclusion
and enclosure, what could happen is a lockdown on the creation of new
meanings, of new powerful significations that 'rock the world'.
There are already strong signs of such a lockdown in the mass
conformity that is promoted by the mass media, which could only be
expected and has been going on for a long time.
It was disillusioning for many to see how the Internet has been tamed
within a very short time span and risks becoming just another agent
of conformity. The centralisation of Internet resources, whose
content is created by its users, but whose surplus value is harvested
with enormous financial gain by Google and others, plays into the
hands of a further centralisation: web sites that are not ranked
highly on Google appear to be peripheral; information which cannot be
found easily on the symbolic battleground of the web appears to be
marginal. However, I think that any lockdown can only be temporal
and not total; that cultural production based on a more radical
social imaginary will not cease but is currently operating at a
reduced level. The combined totalities of government and large
corporations, both increasingly using the same forms of bureaucratic
rule and threatening to choke life out of the cities and the
countryside, motivate powerful counter reactions. Many people find
inspiration in the language of resistance created by African
Caribbeans and African Americans and expressed in musical styles such
as roots reggae, hip-hop and underground house.
Rasta Science
=============
The Rastas have found their own way of criticising power structures,
the class and knowledge systems of 'Babylon'. Rasta-inspired female
dub poet Jean Breeze writes:
Four hundred years from the plantation whip
To the IMF grip
Aid travels with a bomb
Watch out
Aid travels with a bomb
They rob and exploit you of your own
Then send it back as a foreign loan
Interest is on it, regulations too
They will also
Decide your policy
For you.
[26]
Rejecting the language of the slavemaster, Rastas have created
alternative linguistic reference systems based on Jamaican patois and
Creole English. For instance, Rastas say 'overstanding' instead of 'understanding', because the latter would imply submission. The
Internet, of course, becomes the 'Outernet', an interview an
'outerview'. [27]
Consistent in this critique of the West is the critique of the
murderous potential of technoscience and of industrial scientific
warfare in the interest of capital. Whereas some fans of Bob Marley
drifted towards a hippie-esque type of environmentalism and roots
reggae lost its hegemonic grip around 1980-81 (Gilroy, 1986), the
sharp edge of this critical spirit was carried on by dub poets, disc
jockeys and 'toasters' working with mobile sound systems and on
pirate radio.
The 'dub' style created in the early 1970s by King Tubby and Lee
'Scratch' Perry introduced a technological element into reggae music,
keeping the 'roots', but working with echo, tapes, noises, reverb and
other special effects. Music making became a 'science' [28]; in the
1980s this was reflected by the names of dub artists such as Mad
Professor and The Scientist. Besides the critique of Western
capitalist science as producer of weapons of mass destruction, a
frequent theme during the nuclear arms race in the 1980s, dub artists
created their own 'science', for instance the African Arkology of Lee
'Scratch' Perry:
I am the first scientist to mix the reggae and find out what the
reggae really is. The recording studio was my spaceship that was
polluted by the dreadlocks in the moonlight. [29]
The culture of sound systems playing out in the open or at cultural
centres (almost never in regular clubs) introduced another
'scientific' element into roots culture: the optimisation of a system
of speakers, special effect boxes and amplifiers for the specific
needs of roots reggae and dub. The effect of such systems can only
be translated into English by a poet. Linton Kwesi Johnson
wrote:
Thunder from a bass drum soundin'
Lightnin' from a trumpet and a organ
Bass and rhythm and trumpet double up
Keep up with drums for a deep pound searchin'
Ridim of a tropical, electrical storm
Cool doun to de base of struggle
Flame ridim of historical yearnin'
Flame ridim of de time of turnin'
Measurin' de time for bombs and for burnin'
[30]
Sound systems have allowed roots and dub reggae styles to survive in
times when they were less popular. Reggae dances in the UK were
stigmatised by the press as notoriously violent, so that either
Thatcher's police shut down venues or the venues cancelled raves
because they feared raids by the police. Sound system culture also
highlights a number of other important aspects. Sound systems
usually have a community that follows them wherever they play. The
music played is often commercially not available, except on cheap
cassettes or nowadays on home-burned CDs sold at the gigs. The DJ's
play 'dub plates', specially cut vinyls that exist only in small
numbers. The music can be heard best on the sound system and is not
really for home consumption. By thus keeping the music rare, sound
system events have aspects of cathartic rituals, an experience of
love, strength and unity. Despite attempts to commercialise sound
systems, this spirit is still very much alive at the annual Notting
Hill Carnival in London and other carnivals around the country, the
flame kept burning by sound systems such as Aba Shanti. At this
year's Carnival, a carnival of anniversaries (40 years of Notting
Hill Carnival, 170 years of abolition of slavery), Aba Shanti showed
that they have lost nothing of their political edge, rocking a crowd
of thousands with thunderous bass rhythms, and lyrics about the war
in Iraq.
The collective identification with roots culture leads also to
another interesting phenomenon, the importance of the 'Riddim'. The
riddim is the instrumental track of a record, stripped off the
vocals. It is still normal today in Jamaica that certain riddims are especially popular at a certain time, so that often hundreds of
interpreters record versions with their own lyrics on top of one of
the popular riddims. This shows a direct relationship with the
'copyleft' principle in free software.
SOFTWARE AS CULTURE
===================
This software is about resistance inna Babylon world which tries to
control more and more the way we communicate and share information
and knowledge. This software is for all those who cannot afford to
have the latest expensive hardware to speak out their words of
consciousness and good will. [31]
A number of artists/engineers have started to bring software
development back into the cultural realm, and they are infusing
culture into software. But 'they' are a very diverse collection of
people and it would be wrong to categorise them as a movement or a
group. I will focus on a few specific individuals and projects. As
tempting as it always is for writers to extract abstract common
properties from a social phenomenon, I will also try to control this
impulse because I think it is much too early for any kind of a more
systematic approach.
One of the earliest works in this area, to my knowledge, was carried
out by a group called Mongrel, which was founded in 1996 in London.
The group consists of Graham Harwood, Matsuko Yokokij, Matthew
Fuller, Richard Pierre Davis and Mervin Jarman. Coming from
different ethnic and cultural backgrounds (Irish-English, Japanese,
West Indian), they choose to call themselves 'mongrel', a term that
is highly loaded with resonances towards a more open racism when it
is applied not to dogs but to humans. Their inquiry started with the realisation that software tools are not neutral but charged with
social significations.
In their earlier work they focused on laying bare those
significations. A re-engineered version of Photoshop would become a construction kit for ethnic identities; a spoof of a popular search
engine would react very sensitively to certain search terms. If
somebody was searching for "sex", they would be directed to a website
which at first appeared like a genuine porn website but subsequently
revealed itself as a work about the construction of gendered
identities. Racist search terms such as 'Aryan' would lead to
similar results, bringing up aggressive, but in a certain way also
subtle, anti-racist web pages.
Mongrel never went the easy way of reproducing the clichés of Western
educated liberalism. Their work attacked the 'tolerance' of the
middle classes as much as anything else. The name is the programme.
By calling themselves 'mongrels', they claim a distance from the
norms of polite society. The aggressive 'mongrelisation' of popular
software programmes and search engines made race an issue at a time
when the Internet hype was getting into full swing and everybody was
meant to forget that such problems still existed, or made to believe
that the Internet would somehow, magically, make them disappear. One particular work, mainly created by Mervin Jarman, put the spotlight
on the death of Joy Gardner, a Jamaican woman, in police custody at
Heathrow airport. The free flow of information was contrasted with
border technologies, i.e., the techniques designed to control the
influx of people. The investigation into the social content of
software was carried further by group member Matthew Fuller who wrote
a seminal essay about MS Word in which he showed how the software
contains a flurry of social significations: assumptions about the
usage people would make, what they would try to do, what kinds of
people would want to use the software, etc. He revealed a deep
universe of meanings inscribed into what was originally a 'text
processing' software.
The Art of Listening
====================
Mongrel later moved on from the applied critique of the social
content of software to a more constructive approach: they started to
write software from scratch. The social orientation of their work
had led them to carry out workshops during which they tried to help
young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to create their own
digital representations. Doing this, they found out that no existing
software provided a useful platform. The programmes were either too
difficult to use, or they imposed a certain way of thinking that
alienated the user. They first produced a software called 'Linker'
that would allow people to put together a website full of multimedia
content without having to go into the deep end of multimedia
programming, or even learning HTML. But Linker, written in
Macromedia Director, a proprietary software, turned out not to be the
solution, merely a step towards it. Mongrel tried a radically new
approach: listening to users in order to ascertain their needs. They
used workshops to find out what people would want to do with and
expect from such a software platform – people who had previously had relatively little exposure to digital technology and who came from a
variety of backgrounds and age groups. At the same time, Mongrel
taught themselves the skill of mastering the LAMP package (an acronym
composed of the initials of various free softwares: the operating
system Linux, the webserver Apache, the database MySQL and the
scripting languages Perls, Python and HP). In a long, painstaking
process they developed Nine9, an application sitting on a web server
that provides a user-friendly interface for the creation of digital representations online.
Nine9 elegantly solves one of the core issues that plague many such
projects: the issue of categorisation. With any server-side web
application, there is always a database in the background. Computers
are completely ignorant to the type of content that is stored on
them. From texts, keywords can be extracted by some algorithms that
can be used as meta-tags to indicate the nature of the text. But
images, audio, video, don't offer this possibility. Generally the
user, who uploads 'content' to the Net, is asked to categorise the
content. This can be completely open, i.e., it is left up to the
individual user to describe or categorise the content as he or she
thinks fit; this often makes it difficult later to create a coherent
and searchable database. The other option is that the creator of the
database may have already predefined the categories, and the content
is to be uploaded within these. Mongrel had discovered that
predefined categories usually don't work with their user group. Any
system of categorisation, any taxonomy, contains so many cultural
assumptions that people who don't share the same background find it
hard to relate. Mongrel's solution was to leave the system
completely open at the start, without any categorisation, and let the
relations between different chunks of content on the server emerge
slowly, through the usage. Graphically and conceptually, the system
is an open and potentially (almost) infinite plane of nine-by-nine
squares which can be squatted by individuals or groups and filled
with content, linked beneath the surface by a sophisticated software
that compares textual 'natural language' descriptions by users and
tracks how people navigate this world.
SPECULATIVE SOFTWARE
====================
I'm in a constant state of trying to find wings that lust after the experience of transportation while being firmly rooted to the
ground. I want to see people fly from present situations to other
states of pleasure and pain. Out of the gutters and into the
stratosphere of the imaginary. [32]
After launching Nine9 in 2002, and using it in many workshops, Graham
Harwood moved on to write what he calls 'speculative software',
programmes that are highly political from the very point of their
conception. Each programme is like a thesis, a rendering visible of
relations or truths that are normally hidden. One such software, Net
Monster, sends out software search robots, a.k.a. 'spiders' or
'bots', that search the net for related combinations of two search
terms (like 'Osama bin Laden' and 'George W. Bush'), download
pictures and texts found through the search, and auto-assemble a
picture collage out of this material. The results are aesthetically
stunning, which is probably due to the fact that Harwood has always
been a very good graphic artist and has now acquired considerable
programming skills.
Rastaman Programmer
===================
The art of listening has also been cultivated by Jaromil, a.k.a.
Denis Rojo, a young Italian programmer with long dreadlocks, and the
creator of the bootable Linux distribution Dyne:bolic. For a long
time GNU/Linux was said to be very difficult to install, and this was
a serious deterrent to its adoption by less technologically
accomplished users. For quite a while now, there have existed
graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for GNU/Linux or other Unixstyle
operating systems. Once the operating system is installed on a
machine, the GUI enables users who had previously only worked with
Macs or Microsoft Windows systems to use a machine running GNU/Linux intuitively, without encountering many problems or having to learn
how to use the command shell. The concept of the bootable Linux
distribution was created to allow non-programmers to use GNU/Linux,
get a taste of it and maybe discover that it really is something for
them. A boot CD is a complete operating system plus applications on
a CD ROM. If the computer is started or restarted with the CD
inside, it boots into Linux, automatically detecting the hardware
configuration and initialising the right drivers for sound and video
card, and other components.
Jaromil gave the bootable Linux system a specific twist. His
version, called Dyne:bolic, contains a lot of software he has written
himself, that allow people to publish their own content on the Net.
His applications, the most important ones being MuSe, FreeJ and
Hascicam, put special emphasis on live multimedia content, live
mixing and streaming of audio and video.
While the promise of the Internet revolution, that everybody can
launch their own radio or TV station on the Net, might in principle
be true, it is seriously impaired by the fact that most programmes
that allow you to do so are proprietary. Here the standard litany
about the perils of proprietary software could be spelled out again,
but I will try to sum it up briefly. To obtain a licence to use
proprietary software costs money. To enable live streaming, the
source material of the software has to be encoded in the proprietary
format. The codecs are proprietary, so the dissemination of material
relies on the company strategy for future developments. It is almost
as if the content is 'owned' by the software company, or at least is
in danger of being enclosed by it. Because the source code is not
released to the public, it might contain backdoors and Trojan
functions. In short, multiple dependencies are created. Once a
self-styled Net radio maker decides on a particular software,
archives will be created in the associated format, which makes it
harder to switch later. Also, because commercial software companies
usually pay little tribute to the needs of users who are financially
less privileged, they optimise their programmes for high-bandwidth
connections and follow the rapid update cycles of the high-tech
industries.
Jaromil's Dyne:bolic boot CD and the applications on it respond to
these problems in various ways. Dyne:bolic is free software in the
Stallman sense; everything on it is in accordance with the GPL. It
runs on basically anything that has a CPU, doing particularly well on
older computers. The source code is made available. MuSe, the main
audio streaming tool, recognises the quality of a net connection and
throttles the bit rate of data transmissions accordingly. Thus, on a high-bandwidth connection, it streams out top quality audio, while on
a dodgy dial-up phone line connection, something, at least, is
guaranteed to come out at the other end.
All these decisions did not come overnight and were not made
automatically. Like Mongrel, Jaromil spends a lot of time listening
to users or potential users. In 2002, he travelled to Palestine to
find out what the people there might need or want. One of the
results of this journey was that he implemented non-Latin font sets
so that Dyne:bolic can be run using Arab, Chinese, Thai and many
other character sets in the menus. His journey to Palestine was not
out of character. Jaromil almost constantly travels. He takes his
laptop with him, but he does not lead a life normally associated with
software development. Sometimes he is offline for weeks, hanging out
in Eastern Europe or southern Italy, socialising with squatters or
music-making gipsies, sleeping on floors or outdoors. This maybe
viewed as romantic, and it probably is, but the point is that it
informs his practice. Jaromil writes:
The roots of Rasta culture can be found in resistance to slavery.
This software is not a business. This software is free as of
speech and is one step in the struggle for Redemption and Freedom.
This software is dedicated to the memory of Patrice Lumumba, Marcus
Garvey, Martin Luther King, Walter Rodney, Malcom X, Mumia Abu
Jamal, Shaka Zulu, Steve Biko and all those who still resist to
slavery, racism and oppression, who still fight imperialism and
seek an alternative to the hegemony of capitalism in our world. [33]
Digital Culture Making Good on Its Promise ==========================================
The vibrations of reggae music and a culture of resistance slowly
begin to infiltrate the clean white space of hegemonic computer and
Net discourse. The work that is done by free software developers
such as Harwood/Mongrel, Jaromil and many others is in
re-establishing the cultural roots of knowledge. This work is
carried forward by a rebellious spirit, but in a very kind and civic
way. No grand gestures, no big words, no sensationalism, no false
promises, no shouting around, and therefore, by implication, not
really having 'a career' and money to spend. This softly spoken
rebellion is carried by value systems that are non-traditional, not
imposed from above, non-ideological. As Raqs Media Collective put it
quite beautifully, one of the major aspects of free software culture
is that people 'take care', they nurse code collectively, bring
software development projects to fruition by tending towards shared
code that is almost like a poem, a writing of an Odyssey in software.
[34] People involved in large free software projects don't share code
because the GPL forces them to do so, but because they want to do it.
This investment, however it might be motivated, mongrelises
technologies and connects emotion and passion with the 'cold' logic
of computers.
The developments that are being made are not coming out of some
mysterious, anonymous techno-scientific progress but are based on
conscious choices made by users. They develop something that they
might want to use themselves, or that they see as an enriching
addition to what exists. The decision what to do, in which area to
make an investment, is a crucial one.
I'm not sure I choose a project to code/maintain--it rather chooses
me--I talk to the bloke who's fixing my boiler who's life is run by
computer timings or I talk to my mum who's worried by too many
phone calls trying to sell her things--I see stuff gaps in my
imagination or ability to think articulately about the experience
of information and guess other people feel that as well... [35]
There are other significant projects under way in many places. One
of them is the digital signal processing platform Pure Data, a
software with a graphical programming interface used by many artists.
Each programme can be stored as a 'batch' and reused by others.
Real communities of users institute themselves around such projects.
Their choices are expressions of cultural values. But those values
are not really abstract or immaterial. They are embedded in the
lived reality of the people who are involved. And so is the
technology that they create. The cultural vibe of the group gives
the development its meaning, its significance. Similar things could
be said about individuals and groups developing free networks. For
instance, at a place called c-base in Berlin, dozens of people meet
each Wednesday to build antennas, optimise routing protocols or
discuss strategies for connecting housing blocks and city boroughs.
The place is alive with activity because it provides a sense of
belonging, of identity, of direction. Work is mixed with pleasure
and fun.
Digital culture is full of promises of revolutions, but usually the
content of these revolutions is not specified. Discovering the roots
of their cultures can help free software developers discover new
meanings in the 'free' of free software, and engage with society
through their work, and not just with the abstract reality of code.
The language of revolution, of roots reggae and dub science, is
surely not the only possible inspiration but can serve as an example
for many other 'roots' still to be discovered.
NOTES
=====
[1]
'Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price.
<
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html>
[2]
Gilroy, Paul. There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (Routledge,
1997, London) p. 251.
[3]
African ways of living were kept alive in Jamaica by the Maroons,
people who escaped from the slave plantations and survived under
harsh conditions in the hills in an agricultural subsistence economy
based on collective land ownership. Like the Maroons, religious
Rastas are vegetarians and cultivate the smoking of ganja – or the
herb of God – as a religious practice.
[4]
Gilroy, p. 251.
[5]
For instance, a few years ago a Raggastani movement emerged, young
Asians identifying themselves as Rastas.
[6]
I use the term radical social imaginary in the sense of Cornelius
Castoriadis. The term is quite central to his philosophy. It can be
defined as the source of thoughts and ideas that society has of
certain things. Used in this sense, the 'imaginary' is more than
what we conventionally associate with 'imagination'. It overlaps to
some degree with the collective subconscious but is not identical
with it. The understanding of the term also depends heavily on
Castoriadis' understanding of the 'social' and of history. He
writes: "History is creation: the creation of total forms of human
life. Social-historical forms are not 'determined' by natural or
historical 'laws'. Society is self-creation. 'That which' creates
society and history is the instituting society, as opposed to the
instituted society. The instituting society is the social imaginary
in the radical sense. The self-institution of society is the
creation of a human world: of 'things', 'reality', language, norms,
values, ways of life and death, objects for which we live and objects
for which we die..." In other words, the social imaginary
significations are what hold a society together. The social
imaginary is the source, or as Castoriadis would say, the magma of
the creation of meaning/significations/objectives. A 'radical social imaginary' is then, (and this is my interpretation) a source of new significations which overturn the already existing 'instituted'
society. Cornelius Castoriadis, "The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy". In Castoriadis Reader, (ed.) David Ames Curtis (London,
1997) p. 269.
[7]
See for instance, Rastafari Women: Subordination in the Midst of
Liberation Theology by Obiagele Lake (Carolina Academic Press, 1998,
Durham).
[8]
Humble Lion in an interview with the Get Underground online magazine <
http://www.getunderground.com/underground/features/ article.cfm?Article_ID=785>
[9]
I am not claiming here that all AI research in the 1980s was
sponsored by the military but that AI-related research in the US was
given a second boost, after its original heyday in the 1950s and
1960s, through Reagan's Star Wars programme. See Paul N. Edwards,
The Closed World: Computers And The Politics Of Discourse in Cold-War
America (MIT Press, 1996, Cambridge).
[10]
See the book Underground about the 'war against hacking' in its early
stages; Underground is published online:
<
http://www.underground-book.com/>
[11]
A more in-depth account of the differences between 'ethical' or
'real' hackers, crackers and 'script kiddies' can be found in
Medosch, Armin and Janko Röttgers (eds.), Netzpiraten, Die Kultur des Elektronischen Verbrechens (Heise, 2001, Hanover).
[12]
Graham Harwood, "Ethnical Bleaching". See: <
http://www.scotoma.org/notes/index.cgi?EthnicBleaching>
, last accessed 24/09/2004.
[13]
I would be careful not to blame Descartes for Cartesianism, just as
Marx cannot be blamed for Marxism. His writing is more original and entertaining than the school of thought he has initiated. See for
instance Descartes' tract on light in Le Monde ou Traité de la
Lumière (Akademie Verlag, 1989, Berlin).
[14]
Donna Haraway. Modest-Witness, Second-Millennium: FemaleMan Meets
OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (Routledge, 1997, London)
pp. 2-3.
[15]
Edwards, Paul N. Closed Worlds (MIT Press, 1996, Boston/London).
[16]
See for instance Richard Barbrook's polemical "The Sacred Cyborg", in
Telepolis (1996);
<
http://www.heise.de/tp/english/special/vag/6063/1.html>
; downloaded 24/09/2004. For a proper critique of the claims of
'strong' AI, see Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind (Oxford
University Press, 1989).
[17]
Graham Harwood, email to the author, 31/08/2004.
[18]
It must be noted that there exist serious pockets of resistance to
this mainstream version of Internet discourse, from the Marxist
discourse of Arthur and Marie-Louise Kroker in their online magazine
CTheory, to the publications of the Sarai group from Delhi, the Sarai
Readers, and some of the writings published on mailing lists like
Nettime. Afro-Futurism, Cyberfeminism and a whole school of writers
inspired by Donna Haraway create a growing body of work that corrects
the colour-blind Western-centric vision of the Net.
[19]
Admittedly I have sometimes said things that sounded pretty similar
to mainstream FLOSS discourse. See for instance the article
"Piratology" in DIVE, edited by <Kingdom of Piracy> and produced by
FACT, London/Liverpool, 2004; or the article "The Construction of the
Network Commons", Ars Electronica Catalogue, Linz, 2004.
[20]
I am not against abstractions per se; abstractions can be meaningful,
useful and beautiful, like some abstract art or minimalistic
electronic music. I am only speaking against an abstract absolutism.
[21]
See in this regard the remarks made by Cornelius Castoriadis in
"Culture in a Democratic Society", Castoriadis Reader, pp. 338-48.
[22]
See for instance Maurice Merleau-Ponty's The Phenomenology of
Perception (1945), which asserts that perception cannot be separated
into a merely mechanical receptive organ (e.g., the eye), a
transmitter (nerves), and an information processing unit (the brain).
Artificial Intelligence had to learn this the hard way through 50
years of research conducted after the publication of Merleau-Ponty's
book..
[23]
I am referring particularly to Adorno's wholesale dismissal of all
products of the culture industry, based on his preference for high
culture. The significance or quality of a cultural representation is
not necessarily determined by the economic circumstances of its
production.
[24]
I am keeping the critique of this process short because I assume that
in the year 2004 the various frontlines of this struggle, e.g., the
music industry v. file-sharing, proprietary v. free software and the
role of patents etc., are highly publicised and now common knowledge.
[25]
The absurd dimensions of this effort to enclose popular cultural
knowledge is best illustrated by the attempt of some US lawmakers to
apply patent laws to fairy tales, so that grandmothers could not
narrate these stories to children without obtaining a licence from
Disney.
[26]
"Aid", by Jean Breeze. See:
<
http://www.nald.ca/fulltext/caribb/page63.htm>
; downloaded 28/08/2004.
[27]
There is a growing body of work on the Rasta use of language in
cultural studies and English literature studies.
[28]
Erik Davis compared the experience of aural 'dub space' to William
Gibson's 'cyberspace', and referred to acoustical space as especially
relevant for the "organization of subjectivity and hence for the
organization of collectives", in his lecture "Acoustic Cyberspace"
(1997);
<
http://www.techgnosis.com/acoustic.html>
[29]
Lee 'Scratch' Perry; on
<
http://www.upsetter.net/scratch/words/index.html>
[30]
From "Reggae Sound" by Linton Kwesi Johnson. See: <
http://hjem.get2net.dk/sbn/lkj/reggae_sound.txt>
[31]
Jaromil, a.k.a Denis Rojo, Dyne:bolic software documentation. See: <
http://dyne.org/~jaromil/dynebolic-new-man/html/dynebolic-x44.en.html>
[32]
Graham Harwood, email to the author, 31/08/2004.
[33]
Jaromil, Dyne:bolic manual,
<
http://dynebolic.org/manual>
; downloaded 24/09/2004.
[34]
"Value and Its Other in Electronic Culture: Slave Ships and Pirate
Galleons" by Raqs Media Collective (2003). In "DIVE", a Kingdom of
Piracy project, produced by FACT (Liverpool), supported by virtualmediacentre.net and Culture 2000.
[35]
Graham Harwood, email to the author, 31/08/2004.
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