The Political Economy of Free and Open Source Software

Daniel Ross

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

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1*1 Canada Abstract

This dissertation undertakes a detailed analysis of how Free and Open Source

Software (FOSS) is related to the processes of reproduction and transformation at work under modern capitalism. The analysis is grounded in an initial the­ orization of technology in general which critiques idealized understandings of technology and proposes a materialist alternative through which technology is understood in more expansive, and less determinate terms. Such a theorization of technology points towards rupturous potentialities that persist within tech­ nology, upon which transformative processes might be founded. With respect to this theorization, and through the lens of a value theoretic approach, FOSS is examined as a potentially transformative moment. Through this analysis it is argued that while the progenitor of FOSS, Free Software (FS), might possess a transformative potential, the subsequent emergence, and relative success, of

Open Source Software (OSS) represents an appropriative movement on the part

iv of capital, through which OSS in particular, and FOSS more generally, are incor­ porated into the the processes of capital reproduction. Understanding the nature of this appropriation hinges on understanding how the processes of value creation are increasingly socialized. In line with the preceding theorization of technology, situating FOSS within an increasingly socialized apparatus of value production points towards a further intensification of the subsumption of labour to capital, and on this basis, the potential that FOSS, or any technology, possesses with re­ spect to social transformation is understood as a function of the inter-relatedness of the specific technology and the people who make and use it. The argument is concluded with a class analysis of the people most directly involved in the production of new technologies which suggests that while social transformation is thoroughly bound up in contingency it nonetheless remains intimately linked to the practice of individuals. Moreover, this highly contingent nature of social transformation insists that the transformative potential of individual actions is not determined idealistically as will or intent, but is determined materially within the technology of society - manifesting as rupture.

v Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. George Comninel, and supervisory committee members, Dr. Roddy Loeppky and Dr. David McNally. I could not have conceived of a better supervisory relationship than the one I shared with

George. George imposed nothing on me but high academic standards, provided me with the sort of focused academic guidance that I needed, and offered advice that was always thoughtful. Roddy and David exhibited the utmost faith in my academic abilities, intervening only when they deemed most necessary, and always in a most useful way. To have composed a dissertation that met the high standards of this committee is an accomplishment I will always cherish.

My parents, Ms. Marcia Maradyn and Dr. William Ross, offered me consider­ able emotional (and lets face it ... financial) support throughout the dissertation writing process. Moreover, my mother acted as my de facto proofreader, and my father provided me with much needed advice about the ins-and-outs of the aca-

VI demic world. Without their support this dissertation might well have been an

English language abomination two decades in the making.

To suggest that my partner, Ingrid Kiffmeyer, was tolerant of my academic

adventures would be a gross understatement. Her kindness, and ability to sanely

(and occasionally insanely) navigate my frustrations in her attempts to keep me

focused were invaluable. Ingrid never let me forget the significance of the work I

was doing, but likewise, never let me forget the importance of my life outside of

my work.

Lastly, but by no means least, I would like to thank my friends. I would

particularly like to thank my colleagues at York, Dr. Chris Holman, Tod Duncan,

Elliott Buckland, and Devin Penner, who never hesitated to offer their advice,

judgment, and expertise in helping me along with my work. I would also like

0 to extend my thanks to my friends outside of York, and the academic milieu,

among whom are my oldest and dearest friends. To be able to periodically leave

the academic world is something I insist is essential to doing good academic work,

and it was this group of friends that often afforded me this opportunity.

Thank you all.

vn Contents

Abstract iv

Acknowledgements vi

Table of Contents viii

1 Introduction 1

1.1 A Materialist Theory of Technology 4

1.2 The Political Economy of FOSS 7

1.3 Workers and Hackers 10

2 A Materialist Theory of Technology 15

2.1 Order: Technology Beyond Machine 15

2.2 Reason: Dimensions of Technological Agency 32

2.3 Rupture: Technology and Schizophrenia 58

viii 2.4 Information Technology 82

3 The Political Economy of FOSS 110

3.1 A Brief History of FOSS 114

3.2 The Commodity Status of FOSS 130

3.3 FOSS and the Logic of Capital 150

3.4 The Labour of FOSS 198

3.5 FOSS and Rupture 235

4 Workers and Hackers 243

4.1 Advanced Capitalism and Class 255

4.2 Hackers and Class 277

4.3 Hackers, FOSS, Networks - Radical and Repressive 309

5 Conclusion 327

IX 1 Introduction

The enormous growth in the uptake of Information Technology (IT) by both cap­ ital and consumers alike at the end of the 20th century entailed some significant rethinking on the matter of what properly constituted property. This was, and continues to be, largely an offshoot of the growing importance that immaterial,1 and specifically informational and intellectual, commodities have under the condi­ tions of high-technology capitalism. In general, the discourse around immaterial commodities has tended to fall into the broader discourse on intellectual property rights, which have also seen a rapid proliferation in roughly the same time pe­ riod.2 In many regards, the growing urgency that these discourses seem to have taken on may be interpreted as a reaction to the effectively continual increase in the ease of replication and distribution that technological innovations in IT have brought to bear on these types of commodities (such as software and other digital media), thereby increasing the potential for widespread violation of intellectual

1 property rights. To date, the official strategy deployed to stem intellectual prop­ erty infringements has largely been a combination of the development of a strong rhetoric aimed at decoupling the concept of materiality from that of property, the development of increasingly harsh legal codes enforcing intellectual property rights and commensurately the increasingly aggressive litigation of violators, and the devotion of a significant portion of computing resources to the development of new technologies that could be used to regulate the terms of replication and distribution accruing to digital media. Whether or not this strategy has been effective is a hotly debated issue.

Crucially, while the official strategy for the regulation of intellectual prop­ erty rights with respect to IT did not really come into full force until the last decade of the 20ife century (at about the time when the Internet was becom­ ing a truly popular medium of communication), almost a decade beforehand, a group of IT professionals and academics had set about to establish an alternate strategy for coping with the strain that immaterial commodities and IT would place on the concept of property. This group of people suggested that the ap­ plication of exclusive property rights to software was in fact detrimental to the overall process of software development, and as such, the concept of ownership needed to be reformulated such that it emphasized the ontological conditions of

2 software development over pecuniary remuneration, principles captured in what they termed Free Software. Since its inception in the early 1980's the concept of Free Software has been extended to the sometimes complimentary, sometimes antagonistic, concept of Open Source Software, creating the increasingly popu­ lar category of software referred to a Free and Open Source Software: FOSS.3

Moreover, the principles of ownership and use that FOSS attempts to establish are increasingly being extended outside of the software sphere and into alternate forms of digital media - most notably through the Creative Commons licensing scheme which is designed to apply FOSS-like principles of ownership and use to print, audio, and video media.

While FOSS may have started out in relative obscurity it has since come to be one of the most important categories of software, particularly among capitals engaged in the IT heavy sectors of the market. This rise in profile, and economic import, has elicited considerable speculation that FOSS represents the onset of a qualitative shift in how immaterial commodities, and perhaps even property in general, can be conceptualized. From the most vulgar conservative perspectives

FOSS has been decried as the application of communist principles, while from the most vulgar radical perspectives FOSS has been lauded as the application of communist principles - by both it is estimated to be the seed of doom for capi-

3 talism. However, the vast majority of the commentary on FOSS is considerably more sober, perceiving it as no threat to capitalism at all, limited in the extent to which it requires a rethinking of the principles of property, and ultimately an evolutionary step forward in the process of technological innovation that will better satisfy our needs as consumers.

In light of this ongoing speculation, this work attempts to identify the extent to which FOSS might hold within it a capacity for facilitating social praxis, and perhaps more importantly, how it is that FOSS fits into the processes of capitalist production and reproduction. To accomplish this, the work is organized around three major sections:

1.1 A Materialist Theory of Technology

In order to speak about a specific technological form, FOSS, this opening sec­ tion sets out a theory of technology that attempts to overcome the perceived limitations in other descriptions of technology. Most fundamentally, it is ar­ gued that many descriptions of technology are reductive in their treatment of the subject, apprehending technology only as a concrete thing. In doing so, these explanations treat technology deterministically, describing it in terms of explicit functions. Opposed to this, is a materialist theory of technology which appre-

4 hends technology dialectically, understanding it simultaneously as an abstract general principle, and as a concrete determination derived from this principle.

Here, the dialectic is negatively constructed - meaning that negation is always self-reflexive and therefore never determinate.4 In its non-determinacy then, tech­ nology acts upon itself as a concept and as a concrete thing, a principle which asserts that technology is as determined and as determining of human activity, as human activity is determined and determining of technology. In its relation­ ship with human agency, the social abstract form of technology is manifest in the overarching principle of the rational organization of society, and as such, concrete manifestations of technology then are the historically particular sediment of this social abstract form. The pervasive interaction of the two technological modes is insisted upon by the fact that the former is the rational blueprint for the latter, while the latter are the instruments of socio-technical transformation with which the boundaries of rationality are determined.

The immediate issue encountered in linking technology to the rational orga­ nization of society, however, is that what is considered rational is in fact highly politically circumscribed - which amounts to the suppression of the dialectical nature of technology. To acknowledge this issue, and to draw the discourse on technology into the contemporary context of capitalism, it is maintained that

5 the determinate appropriation of technology serves an ideological function which complements the reproductive processes of capitalism, a fact which speaks to the existence of a definite, and pervasive technological rationality.5 This technological rationality facilitates the liquidation of critical reason and therefore the subsump- tion of the individual consciousness in the consciousness of capital (as per Marx's principle of alienation under the condition of real subsumption).6 However, this is not a static repression. Rather, the capitalist assemblage exists in a continuous state of moving conflict through which it disciplines resistant elements and makes functional internal forces which threaten to introduce systemic dysfunction. In­ creasingly this active repression is carried out via the operationalization of new technological forms in accordance with the prevailing technological rationality.

The operationalization of technology in line with the logic of reproduction for capitalism is the intersection of technology with the commodity form, which amounts to technology assuming its fetishized character. In their fetishized char­ acter, IT, and specifically network-centric technologies, appear as the increasing domination of the immaterial over the material (of informational commodities over their material counterparts, and of intellectual labour over manual labour), and along with the associated stage of capitalist development, suggest an im­ minent resolution to the materially bound historical contradictions endemic to

6 capitalism. This is not entirely the case. Rather, while increases in the technolog­ ical sophistication of capitalism continually constrain the possibility of a macro- structural contradiction arising, in introducing heightened degrees of technolog­ ical complexity, new possibilities for small-scale ruptures are introduced. Praxis then becomes a function of the quantity and velocity of these ruptures,

1.2 The Political Economy of FOSS

Having laid out a materialist theory of technology, the second section of this work is concerned with whether or not the FOSS phenomenon might constitute, or give rise to, one of these ruptures on the surface of the capitalist assemblage. Given its distinctive economic character (the fact that it is frequently developed mostly by volunteer labour, and is, for the most part, effectively prevented from being directly monetized), the starting point in this section takes its cue from Marx and presents an inquiry into how FOSS figures as a commodity within capitalism.7 Re­ solving this issue hinges upon understanding the nature of commodity production under the condition of real subsumption whereby it is increasingly the entirety of social labour which contributes to commodity production regardless of the spe­ cific character of labour individually considered. Where FOSS is considered, this principle asserts itself primarily in two ways: First, the utility, and therefore the

7 comparative value? of FOSS are routinely estimated with respect to explicitly commodified (commercial) software, and second, FOSS is commonly treated as a proxy to other commodities enabling their valorization and establishing new value producing forms of labour - a matter which is treated in considerable depth and consistency by the majority of works on the topic of FOSS originating in the business community, and economic circles bound up in the neoclassical tra­ dition.9 Generally speaking, these properties of FOSS offer up the potential to decrease capital investment costs without a commensurate reduction in utility, and further, provide a means by which the value-price transformation may be rejigged to the benefit of smaller capitals.

The matter of FOSS' potential impact on the value-price transformation is particularly interesting given that FOSS seems to offer a potential mechanism for undoing monopoly-like conditions that are present in the software market (the other popular option being state sponsored anti-trust litigation). Moreover, in many respects FOSS is the only reasonable redress to this market iniquity given that software markets appear to tend towards monopoly-like conditions due to the fact that software utility is strongly linked to the extent of its consumption in a network effect.10 What is perhaps ironic here though is that in order for this strategy to work, a competing network effect around FOSS must be generated,

8 and it is on this basis, that much of the business literature on the matter em­ phasizes the extent to which this new network effect in FOSS could be exploited

- the caveat being that a significant proportion of the software experiencing this network effect (FOSS) would not be the exclusive intellectual property of any one capital or individual. What this aspect of the FOSS discussion nets out to then is the theorization of FOSS as an instrument of capital competition designed to facilitate a redistribution of value from large to small capitals. Additionally, the substitution of FOSS for commercial alternatives is routinely treated as being a significant source of cost saving, which is of further benefit to capitals seeking a competitive edge.

What is apparent is that while FOSS does indeed threaten the livelihood of certain capitals in the commercial software sector, generally speaking, FOSS can quite easily be slotted into the logic of capitalist reproduction. This is in fact reflective of the principle of countertendencies which Marx sets out in his pre­ sentation of the Law of. the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall.11 Where capital competition is concerned then, it is not likely that FOSS poses any ulti­ mate structural challenge to capitalism, but rather, may be an instigating factor in limited disruptive episodes centreing on large capitals in the software sector.

However, beyond the strict consideration of capital competition, FOSS also pos-

9 sesses a potential for restructuring the labour market that feeds the IT sector, and it is here that we might find a more deeply entrenched threat to capitalism.

FOSS has been both lauded and criticized for the potential it holds for reliev­ ing capital of the need to provide skills development to labour, and additionally, for its capacity to act as a proving ground which would identify the most de­ sirable workers within the labour pool, thereby casting it as a potential adjunct to the human resources department of capital. While this may indeed be the case, what is of more importance is the way in which FOSS extends resources for technical skills and knowledge development to a large, and relatively diverse population without the imposition of a formalized credential structure. In this re­ gard, FOSS represents a democratic trend in the process of knowledge production with respect to IT. It would be grossly misleading to paint FOSS communities as unstructured, free-for-all democratic environs, yet this democratic tendency is real and speaks to an entrenched difficulty that capital has always confronted where the management of creative labour is concerned.12

1.3 Workers and Hackers

Within the framework of historical materialism, social transformation is theorized as the product of class struggle, and as such, identifying potentialities for praxis

10 in technology requires identifying the classed dimensions of technology. In the contemporary context of advanced capitalism this is a somewhat problematic proposition simply because the discourse on class has been in decline since the mid-20i/l century, subsumed in liberal and post-structuralist identity politics.13

Within historical materialist circles, this tendency to fragment class in identity is rightly criticized for completely ignoring the reality of persistent capitalist social property relations which speak to the objective existence of class, but attempts to reconstitute a vital class discourse have tended to exhibit an anachronistic tendency, projecting historically specific class formations into the present and future contexts.

The major stumbling block encountered by many updated discourses on class seems to be a compulsive desire to retain a traditional notion of class conscious­ ness, which demands the theorization of some mechanism by which a substantial portion of the working class will become, or be made aware of, the truth of their alienated existence under capitalism. Lying in the shadow of the well constructed theories of real subsumption, total administration, and panoptic discipline, this becomes a highly problematic endeavour. With respect to technology and ad­ vanced capitalism, the prevailing suggestion for where a radicalized class con­ sciousness might emerge, is linked to the manifestation of what Marx refers to, in

11 passing in the Grundrisse, as the general intellect - a stage of production in which those people engaged in the social production of knowledge become increasingly conscious of the cooperative nature of their labour, and by extension, the ex­ traneous nature of competitive individualism.14 Though not always presented as such, this line of thought runs through most post-scarcity and post-materiality arguments, in which abundance and content unseat scarcity and discontent as the catalytic factors within the process of social (r)evolution.15 Contemporary thinking in this vein has tended to place knowledge workers (and specifically those engaged in IT work) at the heart of this phenomenon, though the attitudes espoused by these workers, and specifically FOSS contributors and that subset of IT pioneers known as hackers, show little indication of an emergent working class consciousness, and in fact quite the opposite.

In some regard, attempts to theorize class consciousness have made class effi­ cacy contingent upon mass consciousness, and this appears an unlikely condition to be met in the current context where class has receded from the view of many, and is denied outright by the (right) libertarian inclinations of that technologi­ cally sophisticated cadre of workers at the centre of the accumulative apparatus of capital.16 However, the atomistic perspective assumed by many of these rel­ atively privileged workers does translate into a latent potential for substantial

12 social transformation to the extent that this variety of egoism reflects a certain disposition towards the work of technological innovation and knowledge produc­ tion that on occasion will run contrary to the interests of capital. The drive to satisfy personal curiosity, and to create technologies that speak to personal desires, that lies at the heart of this sort of egoism, creates a terrain of technolog­ ical innovation that resists total integration into the capitalist axiomatic simply because the labour is conceived and executed autonomously. Irrespective of class consciousness, or the content of the individual will, this sort of autonomous cre­ ativity holds within it a potential for rupture because it is intimately linked to the most critical elements of the social technostructure which support the capitalist accumulative assemblage.

FOSS then possesses a dual function where class is concerned in advanced capitalism. On the one hand, as FOSS has become increasingly institutionalized and integrated into the logic of capitalist reproduction, it serves as a medium of appropriation through which the potentially disruptive activities of creative workers and hackers can be rationalized and made useful. In this case, FOSS presents itself as an outlet for creative action, but ultimately ensures that the individual desire for sublimation is managed as repressive desublimation.17 On the other hand, FOSS, as a phenomenon which to some degree democratizes the

13 distribution of resources engaged in the process of social knowledge production and technological innovation, creates the conditions for technological rupture on an ever expanding scale, and as such, contributes substantially to imminent pro­ cesses of social transformation that proceed according to the esoteric movements of technology dialectically conceived.

14 2 A Materialist Theory of Technology

2.1 Order: Technology Beyond Machine

The tool is often given a special place in discourses regarding human history, and the development of the species in general. It is the phenomena of the creation and use of tools that are often taken up as an indication of the exceptional nature of the human animal relative to its lesser counterparts.18 Of course strictly speaking the phenomena of tool creation and use are not the decisive distinguishing marks setting the human species apart from all others. Indeed, these phenomena are well documented as existing among other (albeit relatively few) species as well - ranging from otters, to a number of bird species, to of course many non-human primates. Yet the tool seems to retain its oddly human hue, and when we observe encroachments by non-human species into the milieu of the tool it is generally explained in terms of the species' relative closeness to our own species. Even where the relative genetic distance between the non-human tool using species at

15 hand and ourselves is considerable (as in the case of otters), there is a tendency to assume that it is likely more developed (especially in cognitive capacity) than other non-tool using species - it is therefore more human relatively speaking.

Regardless, the human species and its special relationship to the tool remains at the centre of the evaluation. Consequently the tool is imbued with an anthropo­ morphic capacity. To use a tool is to act as if human, and perhaps even to aspire towards becoming human.

Yet the non-human tool using animal is not human. From our perspective it remains in nature, as a part of nature, whereas the human animal's relationship to nature is not so cut and dry. In some sense while humans are clearly a part of the natural world, it is the use of tools that has in some regard allowed them to overcome nature, and to position themselves against nature. The tool itself is something that was at one time an unmolested part of nature, but has since been removed, reformed, and then reapplied to nature at the hand of the human animal (or one of its pretenders). It is at this level of conceptualization, the level at which the process of tool manipulation reveals the more general, and abstract, phenomenon of technological innovation, that the relationship between humans and their tools becomes murky.

This murkiness finds its origin in an apparent ontological transmutation that

16 appears to be endemic to the process of technological innovation. Through this process, some object existing in the context of nature is transposed into an un­ natural human context, and is simultaneously transformed such that the natural material is assigned some purpose which it may not have had in its natural state.

This perception, that a distinct human context exists apart from the context of nature is perhaps most commonly attested to by the casual distinction made between natural and man-made objects, despite the fact that in the case of the latter, all constituent components can be traced back to a purely natural origin.

It is this internal tension within the process of technological innovation, which on the one hand seems to appropriate from nature into the human context, while on the other, can never deny the natural origin of all of its appropriations nor the agents that carry it out, which constitutes the murkiness of the process itself.

The critical factor which explains how the natural and the man-made may ex­ ist in apparent antagonism, while at the same time the latter may be reduced to the former, is the activity of the human agent within the process of technological innovation, and most significantly, the tendency of the human agent to cling to the perception of its species' exceptional character within the natural order - or perhaps more appropriately, outside of it. Thus, the ontological transmutation of nature to tool which emerges within the process of technological innovation is

17 explained by the infusion of the exceptional human essence into nature.19 Indeed, this is not simply the mark of the tool, but of all forms of technology in general.

In fact, the anthropomorphic capacity of the tool reasserts itself in the principle of technology20 to the extent that technology itself encompass a gradation at the top end of which, furthest from nature, lies some hypothetical technological paragon - the perfect mastery of the natural world. This mastery assumes an antagonistic, anti-natural, character where the technological subject denies the fundamental inescapability of the natural world. From this false premise, technol­ ogy is apprehended as the process and concrete expression of the human species' desire to firstly, denature itself, and secondly bring the natural world in line with a man-made design, a la Heidegger's notion of nature's reconceptualization as standing-reserve.21 Thus technology appears to us as a collection of unnatural

(though not necessarily unfamiliar) things, the relationship among which is cir­ cumscribed by the technical logic that transforms nature into standing-reserve.

Yet the specter of nature can never wholly be done away with.

The technological transcendence of the natural is fundamentally illusory and obtains only by virtue of a specific historical disposition to technology that as­ sumes the existence of a sphere of human life that can exist entirely apart from the disorderly natural world. Heidegger recognizes the historical development of

18 this disposition to technology, though the extent to which he understands it as illusory is questionable, and the nature of the catalytic moment from which it emerged is not specified. For Heidegger, the technological antagonism to nature is presented as coextensive with modernity, manifesting as a tragic loss of a ear­ lier mode of technology which respected the objective qualities of a natural world that exists, at least partially, beyond the purview of human appropriation. In this earlier technological mode, the craftsman interacted with nature to bring forth its qualities, and as such, technology and technological processes were a synthe­ sis of natural truth and autonomous desire.22 Under the condition of modernity, autonomous desire is subsumed in a narrowly operationalized cosmology through which the natural world is understood as fixed relative to the instrumental needs of society as-it-is, and is therefore represented as the passive object of total ap­ propriation.23 What Heidegger's theorization of technology lacks is a clear sense of why such a shift in the human-nature relationship, and therefore in the char­ acter of technology, should emerge, though his implicit linking of technology to labour suggests an answer to this matter.

Though the technological subordination of nature (cast as the emancipation from nature) has been present in some regard in all eras of human development, under capitalism the Lockean dynamic of property acquisition is fully fused to the

19 process of technological innovation such that the development of new technologies, the production of commodities, and the appropriation of nature into the human context are all simply taxonomic affects of the same fundamental process which might simply be identified as any of them individually. This equivocation reflects a fundamentally reductive operationalization of our understanding of technology that is specific to capitalism24 - a matter which Marx essentially captures in his development of the concept of commodity fetishism. Specifically, in becoming the bearer of social relations, the commodity imposes its determinate character as exchange value on an ever expanding sphere of life.25 Under this condition technological innovation and commodity production must become synonymous with each other in some regard.

The subsumption of technology in the commodity form which emerges under capitalism militates against developing an awareness of the properly dialectical character of technology in general. With respect to commodified technology, the appearance of the man-made object establishes a division, which is concep­ tualized as an antagonism, between technology and nature. Consequently, the accretion of technology amounts to the negation of nature in the synthesis (which is expressed as technology) of nature and human essence. This conventional per­ spective fetishizes technology as the total mastery of nature, and tends to (incor-

20 rectly) conceptualize this negation as determinate - thereby reifying technology.

Where this perspective errs, is in taking nature as the eternal object to the eter­ nal subject of the human animal (i.e. maintaining the total irreducibility to each of both), the intermediation of subject and object which must be at work within the human animal - itself a part of nature - is disregarded! From this premise it follows that the negation of nature in its synthesis with human essence cannot be determinate - both subject and object are contained within each other.26

The juxtaposition of the determinate appearance of technology with its non- determinate nature amounts to an essential existential disconnect endemic to the human species which is captured in the Marx's concept of alienation.27 The reifi- cation of technology in the commodity form denies the natural (human) element within it, which in this case is a denial of the contribution made by any given individual worker to the commodity as a whole. This constitutes an essential existential disconnect to the extent that for the majority of workers labouring within the capitalist labour process, the horizon of technological possibility is monopolized by capital despite the fact that the production of its material real­ ization is carried out by workers. Thus the perceived total domination of nature by technology finds its analog in the domination of labour by capital under cap­ italism, where the former inherits the appearance of objective truth from the

21 latter. However, that this is the case is not yet the issue at hand. Rather, what is important to set upon is the idea that the faulty determinate view of technology is maintained by the denial of basic fact that the entire process of technological innovation is carried out at a social level. Even in pre-capitalist eras, technology always held within it social means and ends. It is only by suppressing technology's fundamental social character that technology may be conceptualized as having overcome nature entirely - an achievement for which the most critical aspect is the species' overcoming of itself. As a result of the increasingly intensive suppression of technology's social character there has been a drastic narrowing of what can reasonably be considered technological. Throughout the process of technological innovation a diverse array of technologies are cast off, most of which manifest themselves as consumable things which seemingly cannot be reincorporated into the process which has created them - thereby feeding in to the determinate view of technology. Only a smaller subset of technologies appears to be retained by the process itself for its perpetuation. This distinction, which hinges on a given technology's location within the process of technological innovation, reasserts the gradation which was perceived within the abstract concept of technology earlier; and this is a critical point. All things produced throughout the process of techno­ logical innovation, regardless of their relationship with the process itself may be

22 considered concrete manifestations of technology, but technology itself is always an abstract principle which encompasses a greater share of the human context than is often appreciated.28

As Marx points out, the activity of labour constitutes the existential nexus in which history and the human species emerge as producers and products of each other.29 Combined with Marx's further insight that the material manifesta­ tion of technology represents the ossification of labour, this premise sets out an understanding of technology, though not explicitly portrayed by Marx as such, that is considerably more radical than that set out by the determinate perspec­ tive. Specifically, taking these two premises together implies that technology is in fact the embodiment of history - describing the totality of social relations and their material expressions within a given era, and their interconnexion with those which preceded them. History is the accretion of technology.

From a traditional Marxist perspective then, technology becomes synonymous with mode of production. Indeed, this conflation can be maintained, but only if the relationship between the forces and relations of production which compose the mode are properly conceptualized. It is in this regard that the traditional Marx­ ist category of mode of production tends to militate against (though does not entirely preclude) the proper conceptualization of technology. Specifically, from

23 a traditional (vulgar) Marxist perspective, technology tends to get lumped into the category of forces of production and excluded from the category of relations of production.30 When intermediation between these categories is suppressed two possible conclusions emerge: First, if the forces of production (to which tech­ nology has been exiled in this case) are taken as the principle motive force of historical change, to which relations of production are subordinated, historical change is essentially predetermined by technical design, as postulated by scien­ tific socialism and/or vulgar Marxism. Alternately, if the relations of production are taken as the principle motive force of historical change, to which forces of production are subordinated, the matter of historical change is obliterated in a question of pervasive overdetermination, as postulated by only the most absurd of post-structuralists.31 Yet Marx himself claims that it is the relations of pro­ duction which become fetters on the forces of production, a fettering which could not occur if the forces of production were not being imbued with at least traces of a new set of relations of production, thereby establishing the tendency for each mode of production to move towards crisis.32 As such, strict conceptual parti­ tioning is not possible here, and the concept of technology cannot be contained entirely in either of the two categories for the simple fact that the two categories are not entirely self-contained!

24 Technology is a totality, and denying this fundamental claim is only possible if the concept of technology is operationalized in a manner that denies the interac­ tion of the material expressions of technology and the human agents that labour to create them, a premise that is perhaps best articulated in Lewis Mumford's notion of the megamachine. For Mumford, the megamachine represents the high­ est level of technological development, not to the extent that it is some kind of end to a technological teleology, but rather that in the megamachine technology reveals itself in its most complete form - as the total integration of society and its technological artifacts into each other. Thus, the great technological expres­ sion of the megamachine is not simply a growing mass of commodities, or some

Utopian overcoming of scarcity, but is rather order, or in Mumford's words, "in­ visible organization" ,33 This emphasis on order is also brought out in Heidegger's discussion of the enframing capacity of technology - the power by which nature is circumscribed with the logic which transforms it into standing-reserve.34 It is this enframing capacity that establishes technology not as a thing or collection of things for Heidegger, but as a pervasive set of ordering principles and relation­ ships from which things are derived. This understanding of technology as order constitutes the abstract concept of technology, and it is at this level of under­ standing that the non-determinacy of technology is perhaps most apparent. The

25 incorporation of substantive historical content into this abstract form of tech­ nology marks the onset of its determination - the progressive hypostatization of abstract technological order with respect to an overarching ordering principle.

This appearance of a realized determinate technological order then suppresses apprehension of its abstract non-determinate origin and provides the rational context in which it may be given particular material form, manifesting as a myr­ iad of technological artifacts. Through this determination, the understanding of technology is reduced to the tool I hold in my hand, and the awareness of the in­ timate connection that the tool shares with the fundamental ordering principles of society, and moreover, the socially constructed character of those principles, is lost.

With respect to the development of a specifically capitalist form of technology, this sort of fractal nature to technology is apprehended by Marx (though not explicitly applied to the discussion of technology per se) in his discussion of the development of the complex division of labour. While Marx never conceptualizes the complex division of labour in-itself as technology, the ongoing refinement of the division of labour is presented as coextensive with the mechanization of the production process, characteristic of the stage of development dubbed large scale industry, or as it is occasionally termed machineofacture. At this stage of

26 development in the labour process, the factory appears as a tremendous machine composed of organic and inorganic parts, and it is the movement and pace of the machine which dictates the contours of work.35 Insomuch as the factory is a space in which labouring bodies are organized, the specific organization of the factory and the structure of the labour process ape the structure of the machines.36 Building on Marx barely a century after the publication of Capital, the articulation of the division of labour, and in fact, the labour process as a whole, as a form of technology, was made by Harry Braverman in his analysis of the labour process and techniques of management.37

To borrow a term from Hannah Arendt, technology constitutes the whole of the human artifice. Notably, however, though Arendt's thinking seems at times to be moving towards making this claim, she is forced to stop short due to the functional distinction she makes between work and labour. For Arendt, where labour was conceptualized as drudgery (ceaseless reproduction),38 contribution to the human artifice was only possible through work - the mark of which was the creation of spaces of action which would act as incubators of praxis.39 The categorical schema is markedly Aristotelian, as reflected in Aristotle's discussion of the master-slave relation at the outset of The Politics. For Aristotle, the slave, as the property of the master, is a minister of action for the fact the slave is

27 separable from, yet belongs wholly to, the master, and in this relation serves as the facilitator of the master's participation in a life of action (i.e. living at a distance from the necessity of production).40 Inasmuch as the master exists to complete the polis, the slave exists to complete the lower form of the household.

While the slave may be highly skilled in the productive arts, it is by nature lesser

- less complete - than the master, and it is on that basis that the pattern of social exclusion is premised. Additionally, and in accordance with the presumed lesser nature of slaves, while the master participates fully in reason, the slave is only able to apprehend reason.41 In this regard, the slave, no matter how complex emotionally or intellectually, exists according to the rational determination of its master as head of the household and as participant in the public sphere - the slave exists literally as a tool or instrument of determinate function and purpose for the master's use.42 In this treatment of the master-slave relation, Aristotle draws an implicit connection between the capacity for reason and the quality of being a fully formed human, and additionally between these and the sphere and activity of political determination. Though no such presumption of natural slavery is present in Arendt's labour, work, action schema, the sphere of labour, though necessary to the extent that it maintains the human artifice, is removed from any meaningful interaction with the sphere of action. Labour then fulfills a merely

28 technical requirement, whereas work qualitatively develops the technical appara­ tus of society, and action (ideally) animates and directs this apparatus. For both

Aristotle and Arendt, inasmuch as production and/or labour are treated as mere instrumental activities devoid of meaningful political content, consideration of the potential importance of reproduction (the drudgery of labour) is omitted from their consideration of the technical cum political organization of society. As Marx would have us consider, the fact that the social property relations that define the processes of social reproduction are historically determined, and further, the fact that reproduction sustains the material foundation for production, demands that reproduction be seriously considered with respect to its contribution to the total development of society. In some regard, Aristotle gleans this essential connection between production and reproduction in his famous musing on the impact that automated machinery would have on society, stating: "For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, ... , chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves."43 However, given

Aristotle's presumption of the natural rational impairment of slaves, it cannot follow from this postulate that slaves would then be elevated to an equal footing with their once masters. They would simply be discarded or moved into new areas of work that were not yet miraculously automated.

29 Failing to grasp the interconnection between production and reproduction was symptomatic of Aristotle's belief in a natural slave condition, and indicative of

Arendt's gloomy view of contemporary circumstances which she interpreted as the snuffing out of life enriching vibrant political activity. Nonetheless, Arendt's notion of a human artifice, and its connection to a sphere of action, is insightful.

Arendt's notion of action relates to a capacity for willful activity which takes the development of the species as a whole as its end, and it is in this regard that the human artifice is analogous to technology, with the major caveat that technology also incorporates the activity of reproduction.

Considering Aristotle and Arendt brings us back to our starting point: the consideration of the special relationship between the human animal and its tools.

But now the particular form tool has been given up in lieu of the more general form technology, which properly understood is not just composed of the machines we fabricate, but is a more general principle of order that exists, beyond its partic­ ular manifestation in any machine, at the level of the megamachine.44 Indeed, for

Aristotle and Arendt all aspects of society (including the human element) which were not engaged in the sphere of action are construed mechanically, and it is the extent of this mechanical complement (whether slave, for Aristotle, or animal laborans, for Arendt) that describes the political order and potential of the total

30 society. Considered from the Marxian perspective, the analysis of technology de­ mands historical specificity with respect to the actually extant social relations in any given period and/or place. The specific historical character of social relations define the political content of technology to the extent that these relations are expressed iteratively, in varying degrees of precision, and reciprocally throughout technology across its abstract principle as well as in its specific manifestations.

In theorizing an apolitical sphere of labour within society, Aristotle and Arendt fail to appreciate the reciprocating movement of technology whereby the abstract technological principle and its specific manifestations act on each other. Main­ taining that the nature of this reciprocation, or intermediation, reflects specific social relations allows us to understand that patterns, methods, and modes of political, economic, and broadly speaking, social exclusion do not reflect the nat­ ural condition of the species, but rather, reflect the functional requirements for the reproduction of specific social orders. In this respect, the analysis of technol­ ogy implicitly entails the consideration of the extent of human freedom. What is not clear, however, is how technology has been inconsistently interpreted as extending the extent of human freedom on the one hand, and limiting to it on the other. Making sense of these competing claims will requires that the essence of technology - order - be examined in its most fundamental form - reason.

31 2.2 Reason: Dimensions of Technological Agency

The opening chapters of Hobbes' Leviathan prove instructive in the considera­ tion of the relationship between technology and reason, and draw out the explicit psychological and political dimensions of both which are often passed over.45 In the framework of Hobbes' scientific materialism the human animal is reduced to a complex system of matter in motion. Life, including cognitive processes and emotional states, amounts to an ongoing process of sensory input and feedback.

Considering the basic physiological uniformity of any species in concert with the principle that cognition is a manifestation of matter in motion leads Hobbes to argue that the capacity for reason is more-or-less equally distributed across all members of the human species - natural differences of degree excepted. How­ ever, this egalitarian distribution of the faculty of reason exists at a more-or-less mechanical level and does not constitute reason proper. Beyond the mechanical prerequisites for reason, the emergence of reason fully formed for Hobbes is linked to the essentially subjective processes of language formation, and additionally to the logical reckoning of names, which constitute cognitive and linguistic markers for definitions. Critically, however, in defining reason as the reckoning of names,

Hobbes insists that these names be "general" and "agreed upon."46 Reason for

Hobbes then is largely socially constructed. The issue that troubles Hobbes,

32 however, is that the possibility for error exists in both the processes of nam­ ing and reckoning due to the inevitable introjection of subjective bias. Further, with respect to the potential for error in the process of reckoning, according to

Hobbes such error cannot be done away with by increasing the number and diver­ sity of people involved in the reckoning process (i.e. democratizing the process), due to the fact that each will be prone to impose their own flawed subjective reason thereby reducing the process to nothing more than conflict and absur­ dity. Predictably, Hobbes' solution to this problem is to suggest the necessity of a singular arbiter that can impose definitional and procedural stability on the reasoning process.

Hobbes' discussion of reason and rationality prefigures his subsequent discus­ sion of the the state, where the fully developed concept of the Leviathan emerges, and reveals the latter to be an assemblage of human machines brought into syn- chronicity with each other by a singular ordering sovereign power. The parallels with Mumford's megamachine are obvious, and in this regard, inasmuch as the

Leviathan is principally conceived as redress to material precarity, the nature of

Hobbes' materialism, and particularly its epistemological dimension, insists that it is also an epistemological answer to a technological question: how can tech­ nology be possible? The mere mechanical capacity for reason must falter in the

33 face of our subjective passions, and in the resulting conflict of reason, technology becomes an impossibility. Against the subjectivity of man, the human artifice creates an objective context - it is a stabilizing power.47 The Leviathan's gift to us then is brutal consistency in the material and rational terms of life (inasmuch as we can think of them separately), and in the absence of this ordering power reason turns inward reducing the world to a state of chaotic, passion fueled, proto-rational competition. In this regard, the dawning of the Leviathan is the technological moment - outside of the Leviathan technology is not possible.

The character of Hobbes' Leviathan solution is dubious in many regards.

However, the authoritarian nature of the Leviathan brings into stark relief an es­ sential aspect of the technology-reason relation that has not yet been duly noted: power. Though Hobbes assumes that a universal nascent capacity for reason exists within all individuals, outside of the Leviathan, the realization of this ca­ pacity is severely constrained, and in fact, the first and second laws of nature, to seek and contract peace, insist that in almost every case, the possibility of remaining outside of a protective covenant is irrational. For Hobbes, if reason is a basic existential fact with respect to the individual, then its refinement is contingent on sociality - a sentiment captured in his remark that "reason is the pace; increase of science the way; and the benefit of mankind, the end."48 This

34 sociality, and therefore reason, is effectively impossible in the absence of an or­ dering power, and thus the development of reason entails the imposition of a very specific form of governance. In this regard, Hobbes' Leviathan argument firmly establishes a relationship between power and knowledge bound up in the con­ cept of reason. Foucault describes the essential nature of this relationship, and most critically its dialectical nature, in stating: "[P]ower produces knowledge; ... power and knowledge directly imply one another; ... there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations."49 To the extent that technology, as has been suggested, can be conceptualized as an ordering structure, Foucault already presupposes the relationship between reason and technology. However, Mumford brings us even closer to uncovering this rela­ tionship with his observation that there are two essential elements involved in the construction of a functional machine: a reliable organization of knowledge, and an elabourate structure for giving orders, carrying them out, and following them through.50 In this regard, Mumford underscores how power is applied to knowl­ edge in an ordering and transmitting capacity which inheres to the basic structure of technology. Likewise, as Hobbes suggested, and as Foucault critiques51, reason seems to hinge on the ability to order and transmit knowledge. In this regard,

35 the concepts of technology and reason are inherently linked through their shared concern over the powered nature of knowledge.

In his analysis of the labour process of large scale industry Marx provides us with a critique which lays out (at least in part) the specific historical form of the intersection between technology and reason that emerges under capitalism. The critique proceeds in two stages: First, and in the vein of Mumford's thinking,

Marx identifies an imperative to separate design (abstract thinking work) from execution (material application of labour power), which amounts to the imposi­ tion of a definite power over the knowledge of production.52 Or as Braverman has suggested, a desire on the part of management to appropriate, monopolize and make explicit the knowledge of production.53 Second, Marx shows an increasing tendency to adjust the activity of the labouring worker to the motion of the ma­ chine on/with which she works. In this regard, the human element of the labour process is increasingly reduced to the facilitator and imitator of machine activity

- the worker becomes the object of a machinic power. The structuring of this machinic power is, according to the design-execution separation, the prerogative of management which should be in accord with the overarching reason prescribing the terms of efficient capitalist production. The factory then is not simply a space to house machines and people, but is, as previously stated, in fact a machine it-

36 self to the extent that it functions as a space in which power may be brought to bear on the forces of production in order to bring them into line with the gov­ erning reason of the market.54 Moreover, as capitalism develops, this machinic character of the factory is generalized to the rest of society as the processes of production and reproduction become increasingly diffuse, and commodification becomes more intensive. This generalization culminates in the realization of to­ tal social subjugation to the logic of capitalist accumulation, which autonomist

Marxists have identified as the emergence of the social factory, or real subsump­ tion in Marx's terms.55 In this regard, for Marx, the development of capitalism entails a progressive extension of a specific capitalist machinic character in which the power-knowledge relationship is circumscribed by the capitalist logic that it also reproduces: power producing reason producing power. Here the power- knowledge dialectic finds its historical expression as reason in the form of the logic of capitalist accumulation, and as technology in the form of the composi­ tion of the industrial labour process - both of which are increasingly generalized outwards to society as a whole.

While Marx seems to associate technological society with capitalist society in some regard, his periodization does not foreclose on the claim that the whole history of human development (including its pre-capitalist stages) can be con-

37 ceptualized in terms of a technological (or at least machinic) process. Indeed, both Hobbes and Mumford illustrate how the Leviathan and/or megamachine

(which Mumford associated with specifically pre-capitalist absolutist structures) may obtain to potentially non-capitalist social formations. The binding of power to knowledge as either reason or technology is not unique to capitalism. How­ ever, under capitalism the power-knowledge relationship assumes a particular historical form centred on the principle of private property, wherein the terminus of power lies in capital accumulation. On this basis, the intrinsic competitive dynamic of the market economy compels capital to engage in an ever more in­ tense and rapid process of technological innovation, and it is to this technological imperative that knowledge is fused. Under preceding modes of production the technological imperative would differ with respect to the dominant articulation of power, and likewise, what constituted socially appropriate forms of knowledge and technology would differ. For Heidegger, the shift in technological form over time is explained in terms of a fundamental change in the relationship between people and their technology. As noted earlier, the theoretical cusp in this move­ ment, at which point the process of technological innovation shifts from revealing

(the bringing forth of natural truth in the form of technology) to destining (the subsumption of human life in technology), seems to function as a demarcation

38 for modernity.56 However, why modern technology is somehow essentially dif­ ferent from its predecessor, and why exactly this shift occurs, is left a rather ambiguous matter.57 Heidegger's explanation is linked to his understanding of causation, according to which the finished product is somehow presupposed in the unrefined/uncombined raw materials it is composed of. As Andrew Feen- berg points out, this leads Heidegger to a deterministic, and even teleological, view of technology.58 Nonetheless, Heidegger sets upon a critical theme in his inquiry. Specifically, the matter of technological autonomy and its relationship with modernity.

The problem Heidegger encounters stems from the ontological nature of his inquiry which forces him to essentialize technology, giving it a determinate and ultimately deterministic character on which he bases his claim regarding techno­ logical autonomy. But Heidegger's inclination to take this line of argument is not perplexing. There is clearly a commonly held concern over the matter of techno­ logical autonomy, as well as suspicion regarding its extent. However, identifying the source of this perceived autonomy is dependent on avoiding any technologi­ cal essentialization, and rather understanding how technology exists as a social entity. In this regard, Mumford, reflecting on the disappearance of the megama­ chine, provides an excellent insight in stating that "[t]he one lasting contribution

39 of the megamachine was the myth of the machine itself: the notion that this ma­ chine was, by its very nature, absolutely irresistible ,.."59 Likewise, for Hobbes, the Leviathan was never identical with either the state or the sovereign, nor any specific internal configuration, but was a mythical construct which presented an idealized technological form in which social order would be preserved in accor­ dance with an enduring form of reason. It is this mythical status that technology has achieved in modernity that allows it to appear as an autonomous power.

The antagonism between humans and nature which was at one time rationalized in terms of a mythical world external to the lives of humans is increasingly re­ solved as the natural world is subdued by an expanding technological apparatus, a process that reached its critical mass under the banner of enlightenment. As

Horkheimer and Adorno put it: "Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized. ...

Nothing is allowed to remain outside, since the mere idea of the "outside" is the real source of fear."60

There is an ironic aspect to this technological mythologization, for the princi­ ple goal of the enlightenment project was to do away with mythical, non-rational, understandings of the world. However, in its success, reason cum enlightenment was realized as the true usurper of the throne of mythology. "The more com­ pletely the machinery of thought subjugates existence, the more blindly it is satis-

40 fied with reproducing it. Enlightenment thereby regresses to the mythology it has never been able to escape."61 This double negation is thematically Promethean, and sees the technological apparatus take the place of God.62 More importantly though, the character of the Enlightenment, gave reason a very specific content.

Heidegger reflects on this in his consideration of the development of science which he suggests has been operationalized in terms of research, defined as the rigor­ ous application of a preformulated ground plan to all inquiry, thereby effectively rendering scientific conclusions ex-post. For Heidegger, this operationalization of science constitutes the domination of knowledge by methodology.63 It is notable that methodology is effectively the ossification of a set of epistemological ordering principles, given that consistency is a fundamental characteristic for any scien­ tific instrument. As such, the domination of methodology over knowledge ensures the predictable reproduction of reason. Horkheimer makes a number of salient points continuing this line of thought. Specifically, Horkheimer makes the claim that the prevailing form of reason encourages the adaptation of means to ends and assumes an economistic character, functioning as a "pragmatic instrument oriented towards expediency, cold and sober."64 That ends are considered beyond the purview of reason is symptomatic of the fact that advancing civilization is the story of the developing and ascending subject, with the general outcome be-

41 ing that the subject eventually takes itself as wholly constitutive.65 Thus, if we accept a determinate view of technology, our expanding technological appropri­ ation of nature must ultimately culminate in the total subsumption of nature in technology thereby giving technology the content of the entire horizon of human possibility. The total overcoming of nature must then also coincide with the es­ tablishment of a form of hegemonic reason which attains its hegemonic status as a consequence of the perceived success of this process. Everything must become interior to technology from this perspective, and as such, technology, which began as an instrument of the human struggle against nature, must eventually appear as external, and ultimately autonomous, to us. But if we take a non-determinate perspective on technology, then it becomes clear that this technological autonomy is indeed mere appearance.

The conclusion that technology is, or eventually will, constitute an autonomous power depends on ignoring the power-knowledge dialectic that it encompasses, and additionally, its relationship with reason. Specifically, the appearance of tech­ nological autonomy is dependent on accepting the power which it binds to knowl­ edge as: unidirectional and linear in action, and singular, universal and purely objective in nature. Both conditions function to preclude the active interven­ tion of the subject in the technological realm. However, from a non-determinate

42 perspective of technology, as set out in the first section, accepting either of these conditions can only be considered symptomatic of an understanding of technology that is thoroughly reified. Thus, it is no coincidence that Marx's characterization of large scale industry inheres a highly technological nature, as it also corresponds with the historical ascendancy of the reified commodity form. In the historical juncture of technology and capitalism, the determinate perspective of technology is dominated by the proclaimed rationality of the market which is continually re­ confirmed by the seemingly miraculous pace of technological innovation. Under this condition, the historical corpus of technology in its entirety is fallaciously recast as capitalist technology, and reason as the logic of capital.

If the mythologization of technology reached its critical mass during the En­ lightenment, then under capitalism it appears to have entered into a chain re­ action. While the use of tools has always implied a process of reification, it is only under capitalism that the reified commodity form becomes generalized and human life is moved into a relationship of equivalence with the products of its labour.66 Under this condition, technology, as simultaneous product (commodity) and producer (labour process), is entirely self-referential and asserts the reason with which it is aligned at every turn, establishing its protocols and the horizon of possibilities it encompasses as common sense. Marcuse identified this condition

43 under the rubric of one-dimensionality whereby our differentiated subjectivities are swallowed up in what we take as objective reality. This problematic swal­ lowing up of the subject is compounded by the function of the mimetic faculty via which there is "an immediate identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with the society as a whole."67 While this mimetic faculty is not necessarily a corrosive influence on human autonomy, when it is exercised in accordance with the governing logic of capitalist society, and specifically its corn- modifying power which dictates the terms on which the liquidation of the subject proceeds, it functions in the service of technological reification - the disinvestment of autonomy by the human subject. In this regard, the mimetic faculty recedes and then reasserts itself. As a primitive faculty by which man mimics nature, the mimetic faculty is abolished as reason increasingly dominates nature and banishes any sense of objective externality. However, as this project of natural appropriation becomes increasingly total in scope, subjective instrumental reason takes on the appearance of natural universal reason. Consequently, the mimetic faculty reasserts itself and again the human subject mimics nature, though in this instance nature is in fact the product of subjective instrumental reason. This re­ turn of the mimetic faculty can be explained in terms of a desire to reestablish some sort of objective frame of reference in the face of pervasive subjectivity.68

44 The outcome of this process is grim: the return of the mimetic faculty coincides with the subsumption of the human species in its own technology - a technology designed to dominate and appropriate the object it is set upon. In this regard, capitalism represents the loftiest of technological achievements - the denaturing of the human animal itself, and its transmutation into a commodity.

The total reification of technology, and therefore its perceived autonomy, could not have occurred in the preceding non-capitalist social structures for the simple fact that total reification depends on establishing an absolute standard of eval­ uation in terms of the reified object. Capitalism's special power in this regard is that it exploits the mimetic faculty of the human species by unifying the hu­ man experience in terms of commodity production and consumption, which is in turn expressed in terms of a single evaluative measure - the exchange value of commodities.69 Consequently, reason's content is defined in terms of instrumental utilitarian considerations oriented towards the expedient and efficient production of commodities. The mythical character of technology then derives from the fact that the form of individualistic rationality which was ascendant through­ out the enlightenment project, turns inward upon itself under capitalism with the net effect of disconnecting the individual from the technological context in which they live. Prior to the onset of capitalist social property relations, the

45 individualistic rationality of the enlightenment dictated that meaningful auton­ omy was realized via the engagement of the individual in the public sphere. This engagement constituted a transference of political content between both of these spheres of activity. However, with the onset of commodified society, and most fundamentally, with the ascendancy of the institution of private property, the content of autonomy is increasingly understood as identical with the content of a private sphere conceptualized in narrow economic terms. In the context of capitalist social property relations then, individualistic rationality demands with­ drawal from the public sphere, thereby transforming it into little more than the site of atomized competition.70 Inasmuch as technology is commodified, it there­ fore appears as the product of a rationally autonomous subject, but likewise, all connection beyond the exchange relation to this subject is lost, subsumed in the commodity form, and additionally, the multiplicity of the subject, and therefore the social nature of technology, is subsumed in the identity of capital. Conse­ quently, under capitalism technology is routinely understood as simultaneously subjectively constituted yet external to the subject. These seemingly opposi­ tional perspectives are in fact resolved within the narrow operationalization of reason specific to capitalism - technology appears autonomous to the extent that it defines what is rationally possible according to the logic of capitalism, but this

46 definition of the possible hinges upon technology being understood as the means to the same predefined ends which it reflects. This technological Ouroboros de­ scribes a technological rationality constituted on the reduction of life activity to the instrumental/technical tasks of reproducing capital.

The instrumental utilitarian nature of technological rationality, however, in­ troduces a serious issue where the stability and longevity of this form of rational­ ity, and therefore the social configuration it endorses, are concerned. Specifically, instrumental utilitarian thinking inheres to a distributive mode of evaluation in which relative gains are accompanied by relative losses. As such, inasmuch as technological rationality facilitates the accumulation of capital to the benefit of some, this accumulation must be accompanied by some form of dispossession for others. Thus, beyond imposing a singular instrumental interpretive frame for a given society, technological rationality must also provide some mechanism for managing the potential discontent that it must generate. For Hobbes' absolutist

Leviathan, and for Mumford's kingly variant of the megamachine, this problem was quickly done away with through the state's monopolization of coercive force and its legitimating linkage to a mythic power personified in a single sovereign.

While certain authoritarian variants of capitalism seem to retain aspects of this mythical external power for the tactical application of violence, the combina-

47 tion of liberal democracy and capitalism has obfuscated the ongoing presence of mythic violence behind the veil of a bourgeois rule of law.71

In some regard, the resilience of capitalism can be explained, again, in terms of the total extent of technological reification. Specifically, in the face of a fully reified technological-rational structure, there is effectively no alternative technological-rational form that is conceptually possible. The established tech­ nological configuration is presented as as good as it gets, and the degree of human misery that seems to persist is quite literally accepted as the cost of doing busi­ ness. As Marcuse points out, it is the hallmark of one-dimensional society that the irrational can appear rational.72 Relatedly, the predominance of the reified commodity form under capitalism, and specifically its appropriation of human life, provides the basis on which the attainment of happiness coincides with con­ sumption - that life affirming activity through which we establish how much we are worth. Thus nominal changes in income distributions, combined with the dispersal of a growing array of commodities laid out for consumption facilitate a perception of contentment. This contentment serves to reinforce the absolute ap­ pearance of the established technological form, with the more corrosive net effect that this sort of contentment inspires rational passivity - a lack of inclination to question how or why things are done - culminating in the atrophy of the rational

48 faculty and the establishment of The Happy Consciousness: "the belief that the real is rational and that the system delivers the goods ... a facet of technological rationality translated into social behavior."73

This notion of a Happy Consciousness in the context of one-dimensional soci­ ety goes a long way towards explaining how capitalism is able to resolve potential contradictions, and likewise how a determinate view of technology, which posits a constitutive subject which exists paradoxically along side an autonomous tech­ nological power, can be maintained. However, this explanation rests heavily on the assumption of essentially passive subjects, which in some regard seems an unpalatable estimation of the general capacity for critical (multi-dimensional) thought. Moreover, even if the general capacity for critical thought is relatively low, society, as a collection of subjectivities, seems like too unruly - or at least segmentary and/or multiple - an entity to succumb so totally to a Happy Con­ sciousness. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, while capitalism is a coherent system, sporadic instances of discontent must emerge where the system fails to adequately meet the desires of specific subjectivities.74 From these disjunctive in­ stances lines of flight rupture from the system in an attempt to find an alternate arrangement for the fulfillment of desire.75 Addressing this potentiality, Debord claims that the reified technology of capitalism functions as a spectacle which

49 accommodates pseudo-negation - the appearance of negation without disruption of the overarching reason/technology. Thus perceived discontinuities are often in fact spectacular strategies of accommodation and appropriation.76 In this regard, the technology of capitalism does not only inspire passivity, it also finds ways of appropriating and functionalizing dissent.

This appropriation and functionalization of dissent could not be accomplished if technology were unitary in nature for the simple fact that technology exists as a social entity, and society is not unitary in nature. Rather, technology must be multiple in nature, able to move with the discontinuities that exist within its social character. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, and in keeping with the char­ acterization of technology presented thus far, the machine character is recursive and iterative, it is present in every conceivable division or decomposition of so­ ciety to the extent that society itself is a machine comprised of an assemblage of other machines ... and so on.77 The imposition of the capitalist axiomatic serves to constrain the assemblage in some regard by circumscribing each machine with a functional definition which pertains to the governing principles of the axiomatic in general. This constraint orders the capitalist assemblage in a more-or-less pre­ dictable fashion, rendering all machines functional sites distributed within a seri­ alized space,78 which facilitates its administration - amounting to the appropria-

50 tion of dissent, and/or the application of discipline. The former is achieved most obviously by expanding the selection of commodities available for consumption: if no commodity meets your fancy, then one can always be produced. However, appropriative tactics certainly include the more spectacular forms of diversion delivered through the culture industry, which denies the homogeneous capitalist thematic of its product by veiling it in a spectacular form that passes the anal­ ysis of market demographics off as an authentic expression of cultural diversity.

Finally, appropriative tactics might also include an allowance for limited spaces for dissent, thereby allowing for the experience of real freedom in a limited and temporary scope until such time as the axiomatic can incorporate these spaces.

In this regard, the capitalist assemblage is not an internally consistent entity, but in fact a entity which is highly internally inconsistent. It is in fact this inconsis­ tency which facilitates its appropriative capacity to the extent that the capitalist assemblage is working only when it is breaking down.79

In those marginal areas of society, where the Happy Consciousness has failed to gain a foothold, the recursive and iterative machine structure shifts from its appropriative function to its disciplinary function in a final effort to reincorporate lines of flight. However, in expunging exterior sources of authority, the pyrami­ dal power structure, which coincided with the kingly megamachine and absolutist

51 Leviathan, is flattened into a one-dimensional circular form in which power is de- centred. This decentreing is a function of the total reification of technology and its connexion with the commodity form, which, in decoding the content of the capitalist assemblage via the imposition of the capitalist axiomatic, abolishes the traditional master-slave dialectic thereby rendering everybody a slave in relation to the (largely unrecognized) master of the axiomatic.80 In this context, the se­ rialized interior of the capitalist assemblage functions to establish an economy of punishment which describes that ability for every functional unit to rank its performance relative to those about it. This process of ranking in turn provides a basis for the distribution of reward and punishment, where the former is actu­ ally simply the incremental diminution of the latter.81 Moreover, this structure allows that each functional unit may act simultaneously as object and proxy for the disciplinary apparatus with the net effect that each functional subject is the object of the discipline it is sequestered to administer on behalf of the capitalist assemblage. In the imposition of its axiomatic, and its serialization of space, the capitalist assemblage renders its world on a one-dimensional plane. This combi­ nation of attributes conspires to maximize the optic faculty of the assemblage - presenting everything it encompasses in an easily evaluated framework. Thus, as

Foucault suggests early in his work, his inquiry into the nature of the panopticon

52 is not simply an inquiry into discipline or punishment in particular, but in fact an inquiry into the political technology of the body,82 and the technology of power, which in a disciplinary society must be the technology of society.

That Foucault emphasized optics in his discussion of technology and power coincides in an interesting, and illuminating, way with insights made by a number of other thinkers. For Foucault, optics serve as a means of intensifying power, which in the panoptic form intensifies surveillance to point where the subject's gaze is finally turned upon itself. Debord on the other hand focuses his attention on the spectacle which draws the gaze outward towards a specially constructed visual representation of reality.83 In both cases, optics serve as a means of dis­ traction - offering up specifically operationalized content for the eye - which is effective in both an appropriative and disciplinary capacity. Prefiguring Debord's notion of the spectacle, Heidegger suggested that technological enframing cum destining had facilitated the emergence of a world picture - an image of the world which took the human subject as fully constitutive, and in doing so liquidated any meaning the world might have held that could not be accounted for in the enframing structure. Arendt on the other hand, citing the innovation in optics that gave us the telescope, theorized an Archimedian point, a theoretical point in the heavens made accessible to us via optic technology, from which we might

53 look back at the world from an position of pure exteriority and see it, and un­ derstand it, as a whole.84 While Heidegger was concerned with our desire to get into the picture, and Arendt was concerned with our ability to get out of the world, both focus on perspective, and how it may serve an epistemological function. Horkheimer and Adorno note the fusion of distraction and perspective in optics through their analysis of Odysseus' encounter with the cyclops whose singular gaze - lack of depth perception - corresponds with a lack of rational ca­ pacity.85 (Though it would be the inheritors of the Odyssean legacy that would eventually construct, and then imprison themselves in, the cyclopean panopticon

- thereby traversing the full dialectic of enlightenment.) It is interesting to note that Marx, when describing the labour process of large scale industry, refers to the mass assemblage of people and machines as cyclopean.86 In his use of the term,

Marx is dramatizing the monstrous nature of this assemblage, likely referencing a form of ancient Greek masonry (cyclopean masonry), in which structures were built by fitting large, irregularly shaped (ie. not cut) boulders together without the use of mortar. In this regard, there is no meaningful linkage to the sort of optical metaphor described above. However, in contrasting Archimedian and

Euclidean geometry as marshaled in the service of masonry work, and specifi­ cally church building (which is coincident ally interesting with respect to some

54 material presented in the subsequent section of this work), Deleuze and Guat­ tari postulate that the latter corresponds with a templating/schematizing mode of composition, whereas the former functions more as an operational principle which does not fully seek to subsume the nature of the material in the dictate of the design.87 This is interesting for the fact that whereas Arendt had associated

Archimedes with an innovation that potentially facilitated the operationaliza­ tion of knowledge, Deleuze and Guattari presume the opposite in some regard.

Though Marx's intended use of the term cyclopean was likely not intended to bear on the issues being drawn out here, the polysemic nature of the term, and its relation to Deleuze and Guatarri's critique of operationalized reason, gives

Marx's analysis of the labour process a rather prescient feel in the context of this discussion, for it is the polysemic nature of the term that hints at the dialectic at work in technology.

There is nothing essentially daemonic about the ordering capacity of technol­ ogy. However, under capitalism technology becomes bearer of an axiomatic which substitutes the specific order of the commodity form for a general principle of or­ der. In doing so, technology appears increasingly autonomous - divorced from the social context in which it was originally embedded. The slippage between the axiomatic and the array of subjectivities that compose any given society is

55 either overcome by the dimensionally reductive power of the capitalist technol­ ogy assemblage, or it is subdued by its disciplinary power. Where the former is the case, the estimation of technology, filtered through the Happy Conscious­ ness, will be predictably positive: the desire of the subject is in concert with the principles of the axiomatic. Where the latter is the case, the estimation of technology could be either positive or negative. Positive if the disciplinary tac­ tic is oriented towards normative reform, and is successful in coercing a Happy

Consciousness. Negative, if the disciplinary process fails, or was simply enacted as violence without a normative corrective component. This mapping of subjec­ tivities to the axiomatic explains the differentiation in perspective on the relative benefits and ills of technology. The fact that technology is often perceived as autonomous means that where technological ills are identified, their resolution can only proceed in terms of an instrumental redefinition of function which does not exceed the technologically predefined horizon of possibilities.88 But techno­ logical autonomy only pertains to appearance - the horizon of possibilities with which it corresponds is only an historically specific selection from a much larger

(perhaps even infinite) set. It is the reified form of technology that suggests its autonomy. Thus, while the social presentation of technology - its historical form - appears autonomous under capitalism, the actual use and development

56 of technology can never fully shed its segmented and multiple character which it inherits from its truly social nature. Technology may function autonomously in one instance, and non-autonomously in the next. As the non-determinate perspective on technology asserts, this dual character reflects the intermediating relationship between subject and object that exists within technology. Awareness of this intermediating relationship is suppressed by mythic rationality, which un­ der capitalism manifests as commodity fetishism. Just as the reified commodity becomes the arbiter of all social relations, reified technology, itself commodified, becomes the arbiter of reason. In the commodity form, technology assumes a self-referential, determinate character, for which a determinate perspective on technology seems appropriate. This determinate perspective - which must pick a side in the subject-object dynamic paradoxically portrays human beings as wholly constitutive subjects who develop a wholly irresistible technology. The determinate perspective cannot generate a consistent understanding of technol­ ogy - technology is the beneficent and/or maleficent steward of the species in one instant, and its handmaiden in the next.89 Such a unilinear perspective cannot accommodate the possibility that it is both always.

57 2.3 Rupture: Technology and Schizophrenia

Taking a non-determinate perspective on technology suggests a technological paradigm of change which is radically divergent from many of the commonly held perspectives - both liberal and illiberal - on this matter. Specifically, suggest­ ing that technology may function as both an autonomous and non-autonomous power also suggests that inasmuch as technology may function in a reductive- conservative capacity, it might also function in a disruptive capacity. The former would be the case where technology is used as a (non-autonomous) disciplinary and/or spectacular instrument, or where it imposes (autonomously) the capital­ ist axiomatic through its design and/or operation. The latter would be the case where technology is used as a (non-autonomous) insurgent instrument, or when its design and/or operation, or more likely aspects therein, (autonomously) act as a constraint on the appropriative power of the capitalist axiomatic. These disruptive potentialities are a matter that is often handled in a rather reductive fashion to the effect that they are ultimately purged of their disruptive character and incorporated into the (constrained) horizon of technological possibilities.90

This thematic of the fruitful accommodation of dissent is central to a liberal conceptual framework of technology, and is probably best captured in the work of J.S. Mill. Like Hobbes, Mill saw a correlation between political harmony,

58 and the development of knowledge. However, as opposed to Hobbes' top-down

Leviathan solution, Mill suggested a bottom-up model based on the unimpeded exchange of ideas which would function as a means for generating a collective- synthetic knowledge. The ongoing development of this marketplace of ideas is theorized as interlocking with the development of the human rational faculty, and in this regard, Mill suggests that through unimpeded discourse, the character of knowledge can move closer to that of objective (or at least functional) truth.91

The obvious issue with this proposal is that it is hard to conceptualize a context in which the exchange of knowledge would not be biased, or otherwise impeded to some degree, by some intervening aspect of the context itself. Indeed, Mill recognizes this very issue in his discussion of the normative power of culture.92

However, the conclusion that Mill ultimately draws is simply that truth will out.

That this will be the case is derived from Mill's treatment of ideas as commodities existing in a free market, and thus the dynamic of creative destruction which would ideally drive stagnant capital out of the market in order to open space for new, more vibrant capital, finds its analogue in the epistemological realm. This claim rests on the tenuous assumption that knowledge and information can be equivocated with other commodity types. The issue here is that Mill understands the free market structure as something potentially capable of resolving, or to some

59 extent mitigating, bias and prejudice through unrestricted competition. This is a tenuous assumption premised on the presumption of a static and atomized market structure in which all actors are seeking the same basic end. Further, it does not follow that an equilibrium struck in the competition of prejudiced opinions, beliefs, etc. constitutes good (i.e. socially optimal) knowledge in the same way that an equilibrium struck in the competition of pecuniary interests constitutes a good distribution of wealth. Hobbes in fact notes this in some respect in setting out his political epistemology, and this is in part why Hobbes rationalizes the need for a top down approach to the management of knowledge.

Mill's suggestion then is problematic on the basis that it cannot account for structural bias within markets, and further, for the fact that it assumes that the exchange of knowledge is analogous to the exchange of other types of material commodities, when in fact what it means to exchange ideas as opposed to tangible goods may differ radically across these cases, as might the ends to which these different types of exchange are meant to serve. To bring this criticism into the milieu of neoclassical economic theory, if properly functioning free markets are premised on perfect information, then a market for information is a tautology that can only be uncritically presumed a priori, or must be rejected as necessarily impossible.

60 Mill in fact notes that there appears to be a natural tendency towards build­ ing impediments to the exchange of knowledge where the development of any sort of lasting political structure is concerned. While the diffusion of knowledge may be the most efficient model for its utilization, the success of this process entails the successive embodiment of this knowledge in the institutions it gives rise to. Knowledge of a particular character becomes increasingly entrenched and functions as a brake on the dissemination of rival knowledge: escalating so­ cial complexity will tend towards the structuralization of knowledge such that it serves as a source of power for some and not others.93 Thus, Mill's discussion contains an imminent critique of how knowledge may become functionalized, and further, notes a tendency towards institutional path dependency. This institu­ tional atrophy describes a specific form of technological autonomy which militates against continuing human agency.

Weber's redress to this problem was simply to suggest that there was no unmanageable problem associated with the centralization (and atrophy) of power.

While Mill had tried to retain a libertarian bent to his theory, Weber took a step in the direction of the Leviathan in positing that social, political, and economic management would be best carried out by a professional strata of technocrats.94 In this case the democratic experience is fully functionalized in terms of technocratic

61 efficiency - the optimization of means to pre-established ends. While Weber noted that his process of rationalization contained within it a real danger of establishing an iron cage rather than a truly democratic space, the ability to achieve the latter over the former corresponded, just as it did with Mill, with the rigorous application of reason to the process itself. In this regard, Mill and Weber take a similar approach to the issue of technology (or as they would put it - the rational organization of society) with the key difference being that Weber was less concerned, so long as the basic requirements of rational organization were maintained, about the eventual centralization of power.

As the previous association of Weber's thinking with Hobbes' Leviathan might suggest, in theorizing such a strong a tendency towards the emergence and en­ trenchment of a formal bureaucratic apparatus, Weber in fact grafts a distinctly non-capitalist organizational form (i.e. bureaucracy) onto the broader form of social organization, which Weber theorizes as a teleology with capitalism rest­ ing at its terminus. Such a manoeuver can be executed only on the grounds that the institutional content of bureaucracy is either normatively void or iden­ tical with the prevailing social context, and ultimately capitalism. Otherwise institutions must eventually become dissonant elements of the capitalist social structure - a premise which is highly problematic for a theory that anticipates

62 institutional expansion. Weber's thinking ostensibly inheres more to the former possibility than to the latter, and in this respect institutions must be reduced to merely technical apparatuses within which there is no place for political con­ tent. From the social vantage point, properly formed institutions then appear as (non-autonomous) tools in Weber's work, though from within the institution the functioning of these tools appears as the (autonomous) imposition of tech­ nical protocol. The extent to which the reduction of bureaucratic function to mere technical terms might constitute a specific political operationalization is not considered, and in this regard, despite its supposed normative distance from the broader principle of social organization, the Weberian institution exemplifies the determinate conceptualization of technology as a means serving a prefigured end. Fundamentally, both Mill and Weber find themselves traversing the tech­ nological gradient as they elabourate their theories of society, the end point for both is the establishment of some higher form of technology which is functionally autonomous (problematic for Mill, less so for Weber). In this regard, both Mill and Weber are exploring the dual - autonomous/non-autonomous - character of technology, but fail to conceptualize it as consistent and continuous, and rather, see it changing character as it becomes increasingly complex.

The latest formulation of this line of thought is presented in the form of the

63 postindustrialism thesis by Information Society theorists (the foremost among them being Daniel Bell). The key distinction being that the ability for democ­ racy to be realized fully though technology corresponds with attaining a level of development in which knowledge work has superseded industrial work in rel­ ative economic importance. This developmental shift is theorized as providing the necessary conditions for the emergence of a new knowledge class which would provide the technocratic foundation on which a widespread process of rational­ ization could be erected - the possibility of Weber's iron cage could be done away with.95 This, however, rests on a number of assumptions which are problematic.

Specifically, the basis on which this new knowledge class can be theorized as sufficient vehicle for ushering in a new era of democracy is questionable.96 If, as Mill had worried, path dependency is an issue to be conscious of, how likely is it that an entire class could emerge that does not internalize, and accept as common sense, the logic and rationality of the context which contains them - the

Happy Consciousness - thereby being destined to recreate it? Additionally, the

Information Society perspective posits an ongoing process of technological con­ vergence that culminates in the emergence of an internally cohesive technological totality.97 This supposition ignores the ways in which technology and society can be internally segmented, and ultimately serves to posit technology as wholly au-

64 tonomous. Indeed, in this regard, the common thread in most liberal perspectives on technology is the assumption that the process of technological development is a process characterized by the progressive elimination of internal contradic­ tions. Thus, the pinnacle of technological development, its postindustrial ideal, must correspond with the end of history. From this perspective technology is determining and determinate.

Ironically, conventional illiberal perspectives on technological change tend to develop in a similar fashion to their liberal counterparts. This similarity is proba­ bly best captured in vulgar interpretations of Marx's modes of production thesis.

Specifically, in failing to note the intermediating relationship between forces, and relations of production, the principal force explaining socio-economic develop­ ment is reduced to a mechanistic technological apparatus: new technologies will compel new social relations. In this regard, just as Information Society theorists had posited, the realization of successively higher forms of society culminating in the establishment of capitalism without contradiction, or communism in this case, is simply inevitable.98 Again, technology is taken as determining and de­ terminate.

More sophisticated developments in this line of thinking have tended to focus on the condition of post-scarcity and particularly on the potential limits that this

65 condition places on the expansion and maintenance of capitalism. In general, the condition of post-scarcity corresponds with a level of technological development which is able to provide the material necessities for all people in a surplus, and additionally, is able to do so while also reducing the labour required for this level output.99 For Murray Bookchin - taking an anarchist perspective - this condition is a necessary, though not sufficient condition for instigating a change in the mode of production, while it is the escalating level of environmental degradation brought on by capitalism that functions as an absolute limit on its longevity.100

Only when our corporeal existence is directly threatened will the possibilities opened up to us by the condition of post-scarcity be recognized and embraced.

The outcome for Bookchin would be a reconstitution of production on a human scale, which at times seems to inhere a sort of return to the land primitivist fantasy, though Bookchin is clear that this is not the case. Rather, Bookchin focuses on the apparent increasing distributive power, and multifunctionality of technology which could be utilized to build a cooperative network of production composed of small, decentred communities without giving up the amenities of the modern technologically blessed life.101

Marcuse's use of the post-scarcity condition is comparatively less instrumen­ tal, noting that "[t]he destructiveness of the present stage reveals its full signif-

66 icance only if the present is measured, not in terms of past stages, but in terms of its own potentialities."102 Thus, Marcuse aptly points out that the limits of capitalism can only be conceptualized in terms of capitalism's full potential which fuses the mimetic faculty of the species with the condition of one-dimensionality, and places both in the context of rapidly advancing technology. The imminence of ecological terror is not given in this regard for the fact that it is not certain that capitalism cannot effectively cope with, or even amend, environmental degra­ dation; nor is it given that the Happy Consciousness would find its imminent destruction all that alarming. Marcuse is cognizant of the fact that the pro­ ductive apparatus of capitalism is intimately linked with a repressive apparatus to the extent that under the condition of post-scarcity "the continued repres­ sive organization of the instincts seems to be necessitated less by the "struggle for existence" than by the interest in prolonging this struggle - by the inter­ est in domination."103 Indeed, Bookchin also suggests this in his discussion in noting that the key differentiation between the time during which Marx wrote, and the present day is that in the present day real material scarcity has been overcome and now has to be artificially enforced.104 However, his examination of the modes and methods for enforcing scarcity is underdeveloped in comparison to Marcuse's. Marcuse's analysis, however, lacks a coherently presented catalyst

67 that could actually bring change about. Whereas Bookchin marshaled the apex of the instrumental struggle for survival as the moment of crisis (and in doing so diminished the need for a coherent class consciousness), Marcuse stressed the im­ portance of a fundamental change in consciousness but provided little insight as to how this might come about in the face of an increasingly domineering capital­ ist technology. In a move somewhat reminiscent of the theory of the Information

Society Marcuse suggests that the high degree of socio-economic development, and high level of technological sophistication we have achieved has given rise to transcending needs that cannot simply be fulfilled by the capitalist mode of pro­ duction.105. The change itself then might be materialized as a long march through the institutions, literally changing the technology of domination from within, and additionally, developing alternate insurgent technologies.106

There are a number of potential issues with arguments based on the post- scarcity condition. With respect to Bookchin's formulation in particular, it does not necessarily follow that establishing a cooperative network of small producer communities is necessarily antithetical to capitalism as a whole.107 Generally speaking, any illiberal theory of technology and praxis that rests on resolving so­ cial issues through an improved technological distributive mechanism succumbs to the critique that this is essentially the same argument being made by liberals

68 regarding the imminent reconciliation of contradictions internal to capitalism. In this vein, and with regard to Marcuse's argument, Aronowitz and DiFazio have suggested that Marcuse's argument differs from that of Daniel Bell only in its ethical estimation of the current state of affairs.108 This is true in some respect, but downplays the extent of Marcuse's pessimism regarding the balance between repressive and emancipatory social forces. In fact, while the exceedingly, and un­ characteristically, optimistic - at least in hind sight - perspective on revolutionary potential presented in Counter-Revolution and Revolt might lead to this sort of criticism, Marcuse's earlier work is probably more susceptible to the claim that it constructs a repressive apparatus so total that it is effectively impossible to theorize praxis at all.109

The strength of Marcuse's perspective is the pervasive non-determination that he sees as essential in all subject-object relationships. However, his desire to for­ mulate a theory of praxis which incorporates a traditional revolutionary dynamic

(ie. concerted organization and countermovement defined in terms of class strug­ gle) is at odds with the framework of non-determinacy in which he places it.110

In light of this potential paradox Andrew Feenberg offers an alternate, though very respectful, articulation of Marcuse's understanding of technology and praxis in his theory of primary and secondary instrumentalizations. For Feenberg all

69 technologies exhibit primary instrumentalizations, which correspond with the basic functional character of the technology, as well as secondary instrumental­ izations, which eschew specific technical codes and reflect the historical specificity of the given technology.111 Where a counterhegemonic movement is concerned, it is these secondary instrumentalizations which are of central importance as they suggest that the purely functional character of technology may be appropriated differently across varying contexts. Of course the ability to appropriate tech­ nology in a way that contradicts the prevailing axiomatic is contingent upon eluding the disciplinary-spectacular apparatus of the prevailing capitalist tech­ nology, and also more fundamentally, on having the desire to do so. In this regard, and not entirely out of line with the perspective of technology presented to this point, Feenberg suggests that there are margins of maneuver available in society - areas where panoptic power is relatively weaker and where the Happy

Consciousness has not fully taken root - in which these sorts of countermove- ments may be possible.112 What is critical for Feenberg is the notion that the sphere of secondary instrumentalization exhibits both overdetermined and un- derdetermined characteristics, where the latter accrue from imperfections in the disciplinary-spectacular apparatus (ie. spaces in which technology has not been fully reductively instrumentalized - for instance extremely new and/or untested

70 technologies). It is this underdetermination that constitutes a space for counter- movement.

Feenberg's adjustments to Marcuse's thinking on technology and praxis are extremely useful to the extent that they draw out the technological terrain of contradiction. However, it is not clear that in doing so Feenberg has not essen­ tially dragged Marcuse's thinking (even) closer to the Information Society line of argument in some respects. Feenberg mediates his own thinking on technology with Marcuse's, as well as Habermas', and it is the inclusion of Habermas' model for communicative action that is potentially problematic. Though Feenberg is wary of Habermas' notion that there can indeed be unbiased spaces in which a non-repressive rationality may be worked out, in some regard, those instances of underdetermination within the sphere of secondary instrumentalizations, bear a striking similarity to Habermas' ideal speech situation. These ideal speech situ­ ations are essentially a re-articulation of the conventional liberal supposition of neutral spaces in which knowledge can be exchanged, and from which an unbi­ ased - absolute - reason may emerge.113 The (im)possibility of this postulate has already been noted. Notably, Feenberg's theory minimizes the extent to which we can consider these spaces products of concerted action, or predictable structural features of the capitalist assemblage. Nonetheless, the question that crops up is:

71 How can we determine the content of the two spheres of instrumentalizations?

The sphere of primary instrumentalizations is supposed to contain the objective functional aspects of a given technology - aspects which can function as incon­ testable horizon of functional possibilities that can be vigorously interpreted and reinterpreted in the sphere of secondary instrumentalizations. At the conceptual level this distinction works - we can talk about a technological essence. However, at the concrete political level, essence must confront common sense. The issue at hand then is that there is no criteria to which we can appeal to establish whether or not some primary function has not been designated as such by a secondary code: the horizon of technological possibilities, which we tend to treat as an ob­ jectively determined limit, is in fact determined by the nature of the technology itself as well as by its political-economic context - common sense creeps back in.

In general, the illiberal mimicry of the liberal neutral context device is artic­ ulated in terms of margins, and beyonds: 'There are possibilities for resistance in those spaces beyond the reach capitalism! There are spaces of resistance at the margins of capitalism!'114 This kind of thinking seriously underestimates the scope of the capitalist assemblage. The notion of being beyond makes an im­ plicit claim to exteriority. Likewise, the notion of existing on a margin, inheres a sense of increasing exteriority, or simply functional exteriority. Both effectively

72 suggest a potential for positional objectivity, and in doing so also paradoxically suggest an empowering - albeit romantically stylized and devoid of meaningful content: 'We the marginal, know the truth! And the truth shall set us free!' The distinction between the liberal and illiberal variants of this kind of thinking then is that from the illiberal perspective the margins and beyonds function as the fertile ground for revolutionary action, whereas in the liberal variants they are a source of fresh new ideas. This concept of margins, and absolute boundaries which define beyonds, is far too reductive. It assumes a simplistic structure for the capitalist assemblage in which it allows disaffected groups to pool, merge, and fester. Here, Foucault's panopticon is taken as singular and imperfect - it is the total container for all society, and within it there remain shadowy nooks and crannies which can function as surrogate external spaces, and in doing so, partially defeat its total administrative power. No consideration is made of the fact that inasmuch as the panopticon is a container, it is also a general descriptor of the configuration of power that iterates recursively throughout the social whole at all levels.115 The panopticon's function is not to coerce docility from an exter­ nal vantage point, but to induce docility internally. The advance of capitalism describes the advance of the factory from unit of production to generalized social ordering principle, at which point it is possible to work at the centre of the social

73 factory yet remain marginal. The panopticon is not singular, it is recursive and multiple, and as such denies all exteriority.

To deny exteriority does not, however, amount to the denial of the existence of instances of underdetermination. Rather, we must think of how shadowy nooks and crannies are interior features. Indeed, this is the issue that Deleuze and

Guattari are driving at when they claim that the capitalist machinery is only working when it is breaking down. So long as instances of dissent can be toler­ ated within the machine structure, dissent itself is robbed of any potential it may have held to act as a solvent of instrumental rationality: the panoptic form was after all an institutional form well suited to the management of the insane (the sanitarium), and the criminal (the prison). The ranting and raving of dissidents thus acts as a constant reminder to the Happy Consciousness for why the admin­ istrative apparatus is necessary, and conversely as a means for delegitimizing (via categorization) the sources of dissent. As Feenberg has pointed out, interpreting this discipline-agency balance as zero-sum, is a stale (not to mention extremely pessimistic), and unrealistic assumption. History is replete with instances where dissent has gained traction and led to meaningful confrontation with the cap­ italist apparatus - though the net outcome to date has always been something falling far short of revolution. There are indeed inconsistencies in the deployment

74 of disciplinary and spectacular power, and these inconsistencies derive from the

process to technological innovation itself. To take the administrative apparatus of capitalism as total is to assume that it moves with a prescient power - predicting countermovements before they happen so that it may wait for their arrival; or predicting the extent of the consequences of dissent so that it may allow it in one instance and disallow it in another. In this regard, the logic of total administra­ tion seems oddly in line with the Information Society perspective to the extent that the latter sees a progressive elimination of contradictions from capitalism, while the former sees (and bemoans) a progressive elimination of their functional efficacy - amounting to their functional elimination.

Instances of underdetermination do not find expression as margins or beyonds, but rather as cramped spaces within the interior.116 The extent of this cramping should be considered directly proportional to the degree of technological sophis­ tication achieved, and therefore also with the extent to which reified technology has come to appear autonomous. This progressive constriction is necessitated by the competitive imperative of capitalist production which in the context of technology amounts to the mantra innovate or die.117 Under this condition, the spaces in which the panoptic or spectacular power of the capitalist assemblage is relatively weaker are increasingly compressed, broken apart, and dispersed, until

75 eventually they exists as only small points that erratically perforate the surface of the assemblage. This highly diffuse configuration militates against the capacity for the structuralizing of dissent, which for instance, is why many institution­ alized social movements (such as organized labour) are forced with increasing frequency to either reevaluate the efficacy of their strategies, or simply capitu­ late and assume a functional role in the machinic structure. That these points of underdetermination cannot be fully done away with is, fundamentally, and as already stated, a function of the relative velocities of technological innovation and the panoptic-spectacular power of the capitalist assemblage, but relatedly, an endemic feature of the capitalist machinery itself; specifically the fact that it is ultimately composed of a vast array of subjectivities.

The capitalist assemblage is inherently schizophrenic, and the imposition of an axiomatic - as Hobbes has suggested - is an attempt to rein in the madness that would potentially threaten it. The reified technological form is an impossible ideal - espousing a perfect rationality, which it must also continually denounce as imperfect as it continues to grow the axiomatic. Thus emerge shifting patterns in the application of panoptic and spectacular power as underdeterminations con­ tinually emerge while others are subsumed. At the most fundamental level of social reproduction - the reproduction of the species' material itself - this chaotic

76 dynamic finds a generational expression. To this effect Bookchin states: "Every generation has to be assimilated again, and each time with explosive resistance.

The bureaucracy, in turn, never lives up to its own technical ideal. Congested with mediocrities, it errs continually. Its judgment lags behind new situations, insensate, it suffers from social inertia and is always buffeted by chance. Any crack that opens in the social machine is widened by the forces of life."118 But beyond this, the capitalist assemblage must continually confront its own increas­ ing internal complexity. The production of increasingly spectacular commodities compels the further intensification of the organization of labour on a mass scale with the net effect that every artifact of its production (whether consumable good, or residual social phenomena) is collectively produced and therefore holds within it a collection of subjectivities - the vast majority thoroughly subjugated, a critical residuum not.119 It is activity within this critical residuum that produces the observable symptoms of the schizoid character of capitalism, and indeed of technology.

There are a number of features of this critical residuum which derive from the discussion above but deserve bearing out: Firstly, this residuum is not an aggregate, but rather simply a taxonomy applied to those many points of under­ determination; Secondly, there is no necessary or inherent relationship between

77 these variously underdetermined points beyond their shared underdetermination;

Thirdly, the points themselves must be quite small, encompassing perhaps only a single subject, or at most a small group. Fourthly, the content of each point is variable and not necessarily mapped to a single actor or discrete group - rather, its content is defined by the activity itself which can as easily be taken in accor­ dance with the prevailing rationality as against it. All of the points enumerated here derive from the analysis of the panoptic-spectacular power of the capitalist assemblage, and the claim to rationality it has been able to establish, but it is the fourth and final point in particular that suggests the model of technological praxis that fits with a non-determinate perspective of technology. Specifically, a non-determinate perspective on technology recognizes that while the technology of advanced capitalism may appear autonomous in its reified form, and may even function as such, this autonomy cannot be complete, and therefore it is subject to feedback from the object of its power. That this feedback comes in a diminished and disjointed form recognizes the extent to which the reified technological form has been able to successfully pass itself off as an objective condition of existence.

That the feedback exists at all asserts that it is not. The disjointed nature of the feedback accrues due to the fact that while in most cases feedback will be in accordance with the axiomatic, in a few cases it will not. From a traditional

78 perspective, only those cases which oppose the axiomatic explicitly would be con­ sidered as proper forms of resistance. Fair enough. However, this overlooks the significant fact that even when activity is in accord with the axiomatic, there can be no guarantee that its product will effortlessly be appropriated. What emerges then is a model of praxis driven by small, and often heterogeneous ruptures on the surface of the reified technology of capitalism.

Shallow interpretations of Marx's theory resulted in the supposition that the internal (mal)functions of capitalism would eventually result in its collapse which would manifest in a clearly polarized class struggle. The later rejoinders to Marx­ ist thought, especially those of the Frankfurt School, called the clarity of this polarization, and even the polarization itself, into question in light of capital­ ism's ability to defuse (or perhaps - diffuse) the antagonisms which would drive class polarization. Accordingly, the issue encountered from the Frankfurt School perspective is that, given the administrative power of the capitalist apparatus, polarization (at least at the level of consciousness) is either effectively impossible, hinges on a vanguard like counter-apparatus, or hinges on an abstract process of counter-enlightenment with no discernible concrete plan for its execution. What the theory of small ruptures proposes is that class antagonisms within capitalism may emerge in minor, yet important, ways that do not on the surface seem to

79 obtain to traditional notions of class struggle. Rather than looking for working class identities among the agents of these ruptures, we should look for working class identities in the action of these ruptures.120 The managerial revolution, dein- dustrialization, and the rise of the knowledge worker are all phenomena that have frustrated class based analysis of advanced capitalist societies, yet none of these phenomena has done away with the fundamental patterns of capitalist exploita­ tion which persist in the wage relation. Understanding praxis as being driven by small ruptures allows us to grasp without contradiction how it is that a highly skilled, highly paid knowledge worker that is disinclined to be political is capa­ ble of acting in ways that generate real friction with the capitalist assemblage.

Rupture is intuitive resistance to capitalism.

Nonetheless, these small ruptures are bound to be ineffectual if they remain small and/or isolated. Praxis depends on its motive power reaching that critical mass where it is propelled relentlessly against the context in which it is seated.

Otherwise, the appropriative power of the context is not overcome, and indeed these small ruptures will be functionalized as accommodative spaces for dissent.

In this regard, two catalyzing factors are necessary for the transformation of embryonic rupture into full fledged praxis. First, the rupture must increase its mass. It must attract resources and other ruptures to it so as to form a constel-

80 lation in which the capitalist assemblage finds its appropriative power frustrated by the nonlinear, heterogeneous, and decentred nature of the structure. In de­ veloping their notion of war machines, which the ruptures presented here are certainly examples of, Deleuze and Guattari have characterized these entities as existing as black holes within the overarching machine assemblage.121 As centres of intense gravity, these black holes attract the objects around them, and expose them to their resonance (their internal movements). The resulting constellation is necessarily chaotic because the constellation itself is a technological assemblage and is therefore also subject to the possibility of ruptures from within. (Indeed there may be multiple points of rupture within the constellation. Each resonating differently.122) As such, the certainty of praxis is not a given, it is simply a pos­ sibility. The second catalyzing factor is an increase in the velocity of rupture.123

Small ruptures may hold the potential to overcome the absorptive capacity of the capitalist axiomatic where the differential between their relative velocities is shrinking.

Critically, both mass and velocity correlate with structural complexity. Specif­ ically, as the internal complexity of the capitalist assemblage increases, more path­ ways and nodal points are created. Inasmuch as each new point in the capitalist assemblage serves as new nexus of administrative power it must also produce

81 the conditions which give rise to discontent while simultaneously offering up its functional technological capacities (or at least the awareness that these capacities exist). Further, interconnexion of these points provides new channels traversing the structure of the assemblage which allow new, and multiple connections to be established.124 Thus, the dynamic of rupture becomes more attenuated under advanced forms of capitalism. That this is the case has been an issue that many contemporary theorists have seized upon in one way or another, leading to a general excitement about the kinds of potential that lie within capitalism's latest technological achievements, and specifically information technology.

2.4 Information Technology

The term IT (Information Technology) is somewhat ambiguous, functioning as a catch-all that applies to a wide array of technologies concerned with the man­ agement of information and communications: cellular telephony, computer net­ working technologies, media distribution, etc. By the onset of the 21st century, the notion that these various forms of IT were converging around computers and the Internet had gained traction in the popular consciousness, and as such, IT is now commonly taken as shorthand for Internet related technologies. Of course the factual validity of this shorthand must vary from case to case, however, the

82 fact that this shorthand emerged in the first place is indicative of the cultural importance that the Internet has gained. Indeed, while the Internet was at one time effectively a purely academic instrument, by the close of the 20th century, and specifically with the development of the World Wide Web in the late 1980's, it had become an aggregation of a diverse array of information (much of it com­ mercial and entertainment oriented), and a delivery mechanism for associated services. Moreover, as the Internet gained popularity beyond limited academic circles, the economic impetus to establish the Internet as a sort of technological hub emerged which informed the process of technological innovation in general.

In this regard, the growth of the Internet has been, and continues to be, charac­ terized by an increasingly extensive aggregation of information and technology.

It is this aggregating capacity that the Internet possesses that has placed it at the conceptual centre of IT, and further, has made it an object of keen interest for researchers and thinkers from across many fields, and from a variety back­ grounds. The fact that the Internet provides a single space in which people from geographically, and culturally dispersed spaces can converge and exchange infor­ mation with an ease and at a pace that eludes the material limits of geography, seems to grant this technology a power that others before it had lacked. Whether this radical new power would be for the better (the Theory of Information So-

83 ciety) or for the worse (Foucauldian Panopticism), or both, was, and remains, a contested matter. However, regardless of the ethical estimation of IT, there does appear to be a prevailing notion that it constitutes a technological seachange, and moreover, possesses a somewhat exceptional quality when compared to its technological predecessors.

From the historical vantage point of the early 21st century it's difficult to de­ termine exactly how exceptional IT actually is. Every technological shift seems to bring with it far reaching social, economic, cultural, and political consequences that could be construed as constituting seachanges, and in their wake, many surely seemed exceptional in comparison to their predecessors. What is more likely is that the exceptionality we perceive in our latest technological innova­ tions corresponds to the extent that each innovation moves us further along the technological gradient by which we tend to define our species' struggle against nature, culminating in the denaturing of the species itself.

Though the historical roots of IT could be traced back through the various innovations in television, telephony, radio, and print technology, and arguably even to some of the earliest moments of civil engineering (ie. road systems), it is the advent of the modern computer that marks the fundamental technological development that gave rise to what we recognize as IT today. While Charles

84 Babbage is responsible for conceptualizing the first programmable computer in the mid 19th century, the first computers were not constructed until around the mid 20th century, and it was not until the 1970's, with the advent of the integrated circuit, that computers crossed the economic-technological threshold that had earlier prohibited them from entering the sphere of mass production. This later date also corresponds loosely with the development of the Internet's precursor, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), developed by the US Defense Department's research and development wing, the Advanced

Research Projects Agency (now renamed Defense Advanced Research Projects

Agency - DARPA), which emerged in the late 1960's. This combination of digital computing and communications technologies constitutes the embryonic form of what we recognize as IT today, and as such, the IT seachange sets in throughout the 1970's.

Where an inquiry into the possible exceptionality of IT is concerned, this periodization is interesting for two reasons: Firstly, this specific technological change coincides with a number of significant economic and political changes, specifically the shift from the Post-War Keynesian order to a neoliberal order, and the related shift from Fordist to Post-Fordist industrial models in advanced capitalist countries. This combination of neoliberalism, Post-Fordism, and IT

85 roughly describes the (non) phenomenon of globalization which has been preva­ lent in the popular political and economic consciousness since the late 1980's. In the most advanced capitalist countries globalization entailed a generalized dein-

dustrialization as the dirty work of primary manufacturing was sloughed off to

less economically developed peripheries and replaced (at least to some degree) with forms of intellectual, or knowledge based, labour. Furthermore, the aban­ donment of Keynesian financial controls contributed to general financialization of capital. Both of these trends, deindustrialization and financialization, were aided greatly by - and perhaps, were even contingent upon - the development of IT, as it is IT that facilitates the integrating, coordinating and transactional abilities which are essential to both.125 The net effect of this shift, which has been variously labeled the new economy, the knowledge economy, and the information

economy, was a shift away from traditional industrial forms of commodity pro­ duction in advanced capitalist countries, which were also the same countries in which the core research driving IT development was being carried out.126 From within the new economy, the very material of its industrial predecessor seemed to vanish into the past ... or at least across a border to some other country where it could rumble on out of sight.

Secondly, the rise of IT follows on the heels of what, from a narrow techno-

86 logical perspective, has been called the Nuclear Age. Indeed, prior to the onset of IT, developments in nuclear technology represented the ultimate technological attainment of the species. What is important in this regard, is not so much the specific technical aspects of nuclear technology that fed into IT,127 but rather the thematic aspects which suggested what must come next. Specifically, the innova­ tions in nuclear technology throughout the Second World War, which found their grisly realization in the war's final days with the detonation of two atomic bombs, forced the immediate realization among witnesses that there was little that lay beyond the destructive capacity of science. In this regard, nuclear technology appeared as the near mastery of the material world - conditioned significantly by the extent to which mastery could be considered synonymous with destruction.

Though nuclear technology unleashed an impressive power, literally granting the ability to convert matter into energy, the overcoming of the external natural world was incomplete, as nagging anxiety over the potential for the absolute annihila­ tion of the species could not be done away with. Indeed, the looming sense of a generalized and imminent total destruction, and its literal connection to materi­ ality, in the Post-War era (prior to the rise of IT) is perhaps one element which explains why the development of a generalized critical consciousness was seen as a real possibility by thinkers, such as Marcuse, who were writing at that time.128

87 The mutual aspect of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) was obvious, but it seems that the extent to which it was an absolute limit on the subjugating power of capitalism was not.

Reflecting on these two aspects of the historical milieu in which IT is seated exposes a thematic continuity which runs throughout the determinate perspective on technology in general, and with the common sense perspective on IT in partic­ ular. Specifically, the rise of IT, growing out of the nuclear age, and coming into bloom with the era of globalization, is conventionally framed by a concern regard­ ing materiality. Whether articulated in terms of irksome geographical limits to economic potentialities, or frightening existential limits to security potentialities, from a determinate perspective, the technological overcoming of nature amounts to, not only the progressive negation of the external, but also to the progres­ sive liquidation of any sense of materiality. This is in fact the very essence of reification - the subordination of the actual to the conceptual.129 Positing that this is indeed reification, and not objective matter of fact, while also recogniz­ ing that this subordination is realized materially, constitutes the central axis of a non-determinate perspective of technology. The failure (or perhaps just lack of in­ clination) to understand technology in this way, however, has resulted in a highly fetishized understanding of technology. This fetishization of technology hinges

88 on a more fundamental fetishization of immateriality, and it is IT's connection to a some perceived sense of immateriality - or a dematerializing power - from which its exceptional character seems to derive in the eyes of many of its admir­ ers and detractors alike. Arguably, this perception of an extant dematerializing power in IT can in turn be attributed to its decentralized distributional model, and subsequently, to the communicative capacity that this decentralized model of distribution seems to intensify. Thus, the general fetishization of immaterial­ ity as it applies to technology corresponds with the more specific fetishization of distribution and communication in IT.

2.4.1 (Im)Materiality: The (De) Centralization Fetish

If every technological form is inherently concerned with order, then suggesting that IT derives an air of exceptionality from its distributional capacity demands further specification, since every technological form has a (specific) distributional capacity. Indeed, what has inspired so much interest in the distributional ca­ pacity of IT is the degree to which its distributional model is (or can be) highly decentralized, as compared to other forms. What we are talking about here then is the refinement, and ascendancy of the network form.

While the network as a distributional and organizational model obviously pre-

89 dates the popular onset of IT (ie. road systems, flight paths, shipping lanes, and even foot paths, can be conceptualized as constituent elements of a network), IT facilitated (and continues to facilitate) increases in speed and precision in transac­ tions that were until its popular emergence, essentially unimaginable. Moreover, and as a consequence of the increases in transactional speed, geographical dis­ tance became increasingly marginalized in terms of being a transactional barrier, and as such, centralized models of information storage could be abandoned in favour of decentralized models which delivered the added benefit of appropriate mapping (ie. locating specific informational elements where they are best devel­ oped and used, while maintaining the consistency of the informational whole). In general, there is a sense that the onset of IT has allowed for increasingly efficient distributions - its application has been extremely economical.130

The decentralization of informational storage also contributes to an increase in the relative flexibility of this technological form as compared to others. The fact that information can be disparately located, and quickly (often effectively instantaneously) moved or copied from one location to another, means that in­ formation exists as a whole that is in a continuous state of disintegration and reintegration. This disintegration-reintegration dynamic is often taken as the internal slippage on which new democratic appropriations (if only partial) of

90 the existing technological apparatus might be founded.131 Apart from potentially

bringing opportunity and capacity for change into line at the structural level, the flexible nature of IT also seems to offer up a potential technological fix to the nagging problem of reconciling the interests of the individual ego with those of the collective context in which it is situated.132 Specifically, the distributed, horizontal, nature of the network is often interpreted as militating against hierar­ chical power dynamics, and as such, an essential democratic capacity is implied.

Combined with its aggregative power, this supposed democratic tendency in the network form seems offer up the best chance so far of establishing a Millian mar­ ketplace of ideas in which brute majoritarianism can be displaced by rationally directed process of synthetic consensus building. In fact, the ascendancy of the network form has led Manuel Castells to put forward an even more radical claim that "[f]or the first time in history, the basic unit of economic organization is not a subject, be it individual ..., or collective..."133 Here, the reconciliation of the entities individual and group is rendered a non-issue since the network is taken as an autonomous technology in its own right which functions as the synthetic terminus of both.

The sense that the network itself might constitute the principle historical agent of the day is significant for the fact that the content of the network - the

91 stuff of its transactions - is not material in nature: it is informational - immate­ rial. To be sure, a good deal of the information that flows across the network is related to material things, and it is the function of the network to facilitate the management of how these things are connected. This facilitation of management, which amounts to the progressive optimization of organizational efficiency, is de­ pendent on the identification, extraction and aggregation of information that is inefficiently localized at certain points and in specific people across the network.

This aggregation ensures that a sufficiently large scope is achieved for evaluative purposes, allowing for the identification of best practices at every level of the network - it is the pursuit of the economic limit: perfect information. Braver­ man examined the process whereby the tacit information of the worker (which constituted the essence of skill) was rendered explicit and then appropriated by management (the essence of the deskilling process) within individual labour pro­ cesses,134 and 20 years later Shoshana Zuboff examined how this process could be linked (both for better and for worse where the deskilling thesis is concerned) to IT under the rubric of textualization.135 In this regard, these works illustrate how skill, which at one time was localized in the body of the worker, is essentially disembodied and delocalized, initially into a managerial structure, and now into a network. Increasingly, knowledge that is materially bound is being liberated

92 from its bodily tomb and converted to information flowing across the network of

IT. This derealization amounts to dematerialization to the extent that liberated information is no longer associated with the historical circumstances that gave rise to it. Generally speaking then, the perceived dematerializing power of IT derives from the conjunction of its specific network character with the historical developments in capitalism that increasingly privileged immaterial labour and capital over their material counterparts. The popular inclination to accept this perception is reinforced by the fact that the specific technologies that constitute the IT network (like all technologies) are naturally resistant to being understood by people lacking the necessary technical expertise. The internal components of the Internet are not seen, or even cared about by the average person, and as such, for many, what exists between the access points (which are themselves lo­ cated and restricted by the architects of the network) on the network is effectively nothing.136 From this perspective, the content of the network assumes a majical quality - it is materially dissociated knowledge that is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. When this seemingly majical quality of IT is coupled with the fact that IT has taken on an increasingly important economic function under advanced capitalism, the network is frequently treated as if it is the triumph over materiality. The condition of post-scarcity is achieved here not through the

93 objective overcoming of material scarcity in material terms, but through the over­ coming of scarcity via the liquidation of the concept of materiality altogether. It is in fact post-materiality.

2.4.2 (Im)Materiality: The Communicative Fetish

The ascendancy of a notion of post-materiality has corresponded with, and in fact encouraged, the ascendancy of the estimated importance of communication as a transformational mechanism.137 Given that a good deal of knowledge about the material world has been digitally encoded as information flowing across the

Internet, access to this information, and perhaps more importantly, the ability to manipulate it, is now taken as constituting a significant transformative power.

Again, this access to a new transformative power derives from the decentralized distributional model that IT has introduced. What is critical to note here is the accompanying claim that decentralization coupled with the aggregative power of

IT has theoretically enabled disparate and wide-spread access to a common source of information pertaining to the most important aspects of modern life. Simply put, IT appears to promise an overcoming of barriers to democratic participation.

For Castells, whose thinking on IT exemplifies a common sense perspective, this change is conceptualized in terms of a new technological model of interactivity

94 which has usurped the older unidirectional, and highly centralized, model of

McLuhan's Galaxy.138 Thus, the revolutionary power of IT lies in the fact that it has potentially dethroned (or at least has the ability to do so) the oligarchs of the culture industry which had previously set and enforced the informational agenda.

That the Internet might somehow reconstitute the agora on a much wider scale is certainly a theme that has piqued the interest of liberals and radicals alike. What is essential here though is the conviction that there is some signifi­ cant, and substantive power to be had through mere discourse. To this extent,

Arendt provides some insight in her claim that speech is a central component of

Action - the activity whereby we inscribe ourselves in history - simultaneously creating history and ourselves. Because speech is a mode of disclosure, commu­ nication, and specifically the communicative component of Action, becomes the mechanism whereby we may find authentic expression of our selves as historical subjects (ie. democratic communication is self-actualization).139 Thus, according to Arendt, communication functions as a prerequisite for realizing ourselves as fully developed individuals. Alternately Marcuse claims that: "Communication of the radically nonconformist, new historical goals of the revolution requires an equally nonconformist language (in the widest sense), a language that reaches a

95 population which has introjected the needs and values of their masters and man­ agers and made them their own, thus reproducing the established system in their minds, their consciousness, their senses and instincts."140 As opposed to Arendt,

Marcuse treats communication as a potential mechanism of other-actualization

(though this claim presupposes a liberated self on the part of the actor). Com­ mon to both, however, is a sense that communication is essentially linked, in a formative capacity, to identity and consciousness. The control of communi­ cation, and the practice of fearless communication is taken as the basis for the development, and propagation, of a post-scarcity, post-materialist, enlightened, or otherwise critical consciousnesses. In this regard, the communicative capac­ ity of IT appears so critical simply because it provides the medium essential to realizing the identities which are required to make such a radically democratic experiment work.

The potentially critical linkage between identity (or consciousness) and com­ munication has also been noted by Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which foreshadowed his theory of Communicative Action in some regard, and again later by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities.

For both Habermas and Anderson, the emergence of the printing press facili­ tated both linguistic changes, and the propagation of theretofore class restricted

96 informational materials, with the net result that once exclusively aristocratic cul­ tural forms were increasingly colonized by the increasingly culturally informed bourgeoisie. Mumford also takes up this argument, but notably connects the concepts of culture and communication to an underlying framework of immate­ riality by pointing out that inasmuch as the invention of the printing press may have rent certain cultural partitions asunder, it also provided the technological base required for establishing a sort of class-indifferent social knowledge which undermined existing class structures.141 Though each of these authors is careful to keep their cultural analysis firmly rooted in a historical context (specifically the changing force of production), the expansion (or democratization) of com­ municative action is generally treated as the catalyst for further economic and political changes - providing the impetus for changes in the relations of produc­ tion. While none of the authors lets the classed dimensions of their analysis slip from view, their treatment of communication and culture as a sort of his­ torical linchpin illuminates how class, and subsequently even gender and race

(among a myriad of other categorical possibilities) have given way to the less specific category of culture as the analytic unit par excellence in much of the contemporary social sciences literature that emerged throughout the period of

IT's technological ascendancy.142 In this regard, communication, and its relation-

97 ship to IT, has tended to assume a central explanatory and/or analytical role in many contemporary perspectives regarding the political and economic capacities of technology. More to the point, this communicative faculty is often taken as granting IT an ideologically transcendent capacity which can variously be inter­ preted as positing either the end of ideology (as per the reformulated variant of this argument presented in the theory of Information Society), or the overcoming of the existing capitalist hegemony (as per the post-scarcity perspective at its most whimsical).143

2.4.3 The Possibility of Rupture

What is potentially problematic about the (over) emphasis placed on the immate­ riality and communicativity of IT, and why it amounts to a fetishistic treatment of this specific technology, is that it tends towards treating IT in a Hegelian fash­ ion not entirely dissimilar to a sort of Universal Will: the resolution of materiality into pure thought characterized by ongoing civil discourse.144 This is problem­ atic to the extent that such a claim rests on the assumption that the human animal is able to fully extricate itself (or at least it's mind) from its natural (ie. world bound) status, and in doing so establish itself as a transcendent, and fully constitutive subject. (In other words, it rests on a determinate understanding of

98 technology.) Such a determinate understanding of technology must be rejected on the grounds that its determinacy reflects an inherent ideological function which is denied superficially through the deployment of the operationalized concepts of immateriality and communicativity. Accepting on the other hand, that such a determinate perspective is inadequate, points to the fact that the concepts of im­ materiality and communicativity contain powered dimensions which will tend to act in a conservative reproductive, rather than progressive transformative, man­ ner.145 This impasse is precisely why Habermas insisted that the technological and communicative spheres must be kept separate, else the technological sphere

(and its horizon of possibilities) is bound to become politically contaminated.146

The contention here is that no such separation is completely possible, and in­ deed, IT - which can almost literally be defined as the technological enframing of communication - is a striking testament as to why this is exactly the case.

The fundamental problem running throughout a fetishized perspective of IT that emphasizes its immaterial and communicative aspects, is that it ignores the ways in which IT is materially bound (as a force of production, and as a commodity) to the overarching capitalist assemblage. This critical relationship between the logic of capital and the possibilities of technological innovation has been recognized by Castells, who proposes that the relative success of a given

99 technological innovation is a function of that specific technology's ability to gen­ erate a synergy between itself and industrial production and commercial appli­ cation.147 For Castells, this synergy acts as a catalyst for a generalized increase in productivity (ie. not specific to the IT sector), which ultimately provides the material prerequisite for new democratic, post-materialist, appropriations of the technological apparatus.148 In comparison to Castells' claim regarding a capital- technology synergy, Deleuze and Guattari suggest a slightly more unidirectional capital-technology relationship, stating that: "In general, the introduction of in­ novations always tends to be delayed beyond the time scientifically necessary, until the moment when the market forecasts justify their exploitation on a large scale."149 Though thematically similar to Castells' claim in some regards, the claim put forward by Deleuze and Guattari differs significantly in that it sug­ gests that the propagation of new technological innovations is always circum­ scribed (decoded) by the logic of the capitalist assemblage before it is deployed on a large scale. From this perspective, which unlike Castells' recognizes - or at least takes seriously - the powered dimensions of the capitalist assemblage, the possibility of new democratic appropriations of technology at a structural level is essentially discounted.

Castells' conceptualization of a synergistic relationship between capital and

100 technology can be connected to the distinction he makes between his perspective on the new network manifestation of IT versus McLuhan's perspective on its pre­ decessor. Though he aptly seizes upon the decentralized, multidirectional and flexible character of the IT communications medium, these categories are func­ tionalized in terms of a nascent democratic tendency. This nascent democratic tendency in communication is hit upon in Arendt's claim that communicative dis­ closure constitutes a key element of Action. However, Arendt's claim is couched in an analysis that is to a considerable degree informed by principles of democratic action tempered by early republican thinking, and is not concerned so much with technical considerations of decentralization and flexibility, as it is with the more fundamental issue of authenticity. For Arendt, Action oriented communication depended on the authenticity of the agents involved, and how the medium of communication might intervene, or interact with this sense of authenticity, was not considered. When we consider IT as a medium of communication, as its tech­ nological enframing, issues of representation begin to emerge which must inform any evaluation of the authenticity of the communication itself, and consequently qualify the way in which claims such as Arendt's, that posit a nascent democratic tendency in communication, can be applied to analyses of IT.150

Indeed, the fact that IT, and specifically its networked manifestation, is

101 marked by a significant capacity for representation is critical to understanding why it lends itself so easily to a fetishized understanding: the substitution of a virtual ideal for reality. It is this representing capacity of IT that has induced interpretations that ascribe to it some kind of dematerializing power, and/or immaterial nature. To this extent, in his reflections on mechanical reproduction

Benjamin noted that reproduction necessarily entails that images must eventually come to stand in for the real thing.151 The concern here is that images are easily disconnected from their historical context (ie. the material conditions which de­ termined their content in the first place), and further, that when images - or any dematerialized/dehistoricized communicative form for that matter - constitute a significant component of the communicative compliment, a hypostatized pseudo- history is erected. The image leaden carapace in which this pseudo-history is encased constitutes Debord's Spectacle, and describes the disciplinary function of Horkheimer and Adorno's culture industry, both of which are intimately con­ nected to the technological capacities of the day.152

This issue of the technological relationship with representation, and how it is related to notions of authenticity, also has a significant impact on how the specific content of communication should be understood. Reflecting on the so­ cial function of newspapers, Benjamin suggested that popular print media had,

102 to some degree, effectively substituted second-hand accounts, via reporting, for experience. Rather than serving as a connecting force, print media acted as an isolating force which categorized primary experience as redundant and unnec­ essary.153 Experience became the specialized domain of the reporter. To some extent Castells' claim that this dynamic is overcome in the networked society rings true. Indeed, the popular spread of networked IT has in some regard al­ lowed more people to act as reporters. However, conceding this says little of the extent to which we collectively tend to rely on second-hand accounts to stand in for personal experience. In fact, it seems that we potentially have a wider array of second-hand accounts to turn to now. More fundamentally, however, we need to consider the content of this non-experiential information has been informed by its technological context. Bringing his notion of one-dimensionality nearer to the notion of a decoded axiomatic, Marcuse noted how language has become increasingly operationalized with the net effect of reducing the possible forms of symbolic representation.154 What is at issue then when we are considering the extent to which the communicative dimension of IT could serve as a vehicle for social transformation is the extent to which the communication itself has been operationalized, which is in turn dependent on the extent to which we take IT as either intimately linked to, or at arm's length from, some disciplinary-spectacular

103 mechanism within the capitalist assemblage.

The central issue which has led some commentators on IT to discount the extent to which panoptic discipline can remain functional in such a decentralized network form appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the network form itself. Specifically, the concept of decentralization, which is rightly taken as a key defining characteristic of the network form, is too frequently deployed in order to assert that either there is no centre to the network whatsoever, or alternately, that the network contains a fluid (ie. migrating) centre. If either of these two propositions were the case, then there could be no lasting application of power, and as such, there would be no powered dynamic within the network to be concerned with. However, the fact that the processes of technological innovation have been, and continue to be, dominated by both generalized market forces

(emanating from the capitalist assemblage itself), and specific state forces (as in the case of DARPA), suggests that this is not in fact the case, and that there is indeed some kind of centre.

Thinkers like Castells have suggested that the nodal points on the fringes or margins of the network might serve as incubators for progressive thought that could be incorporated into the centre in a reformative capacity, or alternately, might act as the seeds from which a new progressive centre could develop. The

104 issue here of course is that the extent to which marginal nodes could push pro­ gressive ideas towards the centre, or act as centres themselves, is conditioned by the extent to which the disciplinary-spectacular apparatus allows such a push, and/or allows the conditions for progressive thought to occur in the first place: the democracy of communication is assumed. In response to this uncritical demo­ cratic casting of communication, Antonio Negri has put forward a distinction between communication, which he characterizes as open and living, and infor­ mation, which he characterizes as imprisoned and static.155 Thus, transformative capacity is linked to communication, and curtailed by information. In the lan­ guage of many contemporary discussions of IT, however, the latter is frequently mistaken for, or conflated with the former, though it seems worth noting that in an oddly revealing, and exceedingly ironic, semantic shift, IT was once commonly

(and is still occasionally) referred to as ICT - Information and Communications

Technology: at some point the explicit communications designation was simply dropped.

The confusion regarding the potentialities of IT, and specifically the inability to reconcile its potentialities with the powered dynamics of its structure, can be attributed to an error in understanding the nature of the IT network, and has been well captured by Deleuze and Guattari in the distinction they draw

105 between rhizomatic and arboreal structures. While both rhizomatic and arboreal structures can be considered network forms, the arboreal form is distinguished from the rhizomatic form by the fact that its structure is composed of an itera­ tion of binary divisions which can ultimately be traced back to a single origin, whereas the rhizomatic form is characterized by the non-patterned offshoot of radicals, initially from some origin, but subsequently from any point on the rhi­ zome. Thus, the rhizome does in fact lack a centre, and moreover, the dynamics of its movement are not constrained, as any point on the rhizome can connect to any other.156 The shortcoming of many commentaries on IT is simply that they either assume that IT now constitutes a genuinely rhizomatic structure, or alternately, that IT is capable of achieving rhizomatic dynamics regardless of its structural character. Both of these propositions fall flat. The former simply be­ cause we can identify centres or origins which indicate an arboreal aspect to the networked deployment of IT, and the latter for the fact that these arboreal ele­ ments must function to curtail rhizomatic dynamics.157 Nonetheless, as posited by a non-determinate perspective on technology, the process of technological in­ novation, inasmuch as it is inherently linked to the capitalist assemblage, does contain those pinpoints of rupture where, if only for a moment - and perhaps in a very minor way - the governing logic of capital fails to take root. At these points

106 we can infer the presence, which will likely be only temporary, of a rhizome-like outcropping. In this regard, the nature of the IT network should be conceptu­ alized as a fundamentally arboreal structure which is periodically perforated by rhizomatic elements.

Whether or not these rhizomatic ruptures on the surface of the IT network will result in the emanation of any sort of meaningful transformative force is con­ tingent on whether or not communicative action, and/or informational content can be translated into historical action and content.158 This might seem like an obvious claim, however, it is a claim that is in many ways unrecognized in the determinate/fetishized perspective on technology - which tends to treat communi­ cation as an end it itself. Where such a materialization is possible, is dependent on the disciplinary patterns established by the administrative apparatus, and specifically on the coincidence of an inclined subjective will and sufficient struc­ tural freedom. The frequency of the coincidence of these requisite conditions will in turn depend on the material conditions in which a specific technological form is deployed. For this reason, many commentators reflecting on possible democratic appropriations of technology have looked to historical circumstances in which material conditions conducive to agitation are prevalent (as in the EZLN's use of the Internet for coordinative and communicative purposes), and/or untested

107 technological forms have been introduced (as in the case of the French Minitel system).159 It is critical to keep in mind, however, the fact that rupture cannot be taken as synonymous with democratic, or even simply non-repressive, appro­ priation. For example, William Mitchell has noted that technological innovations designed to improve some aspect of our lives, are often appropriated to a de­ structive and/or oppressive function. To illustrate, Mitchell cites the established tendency towards the further miniaturization of electronic components, which could be usefully used in medical applications on one hand, and terroristic ap­ plications on the other.160 Likewise, the extent to which the Internet facilitated anonymous communication has variously been interpreted as both a positive and negative feature of that specific technological form. Regardless, what is poten­ tially troubling about claiming that the potential for rupture is determined by the coincidence of subjective will and structural capacity is that the conditions defining each often appear to be linked in an inverse relationship: that is, the technological apparatus that delivers post-scarcity is identical with the one that delivers the Happy Consciousness. This is the paradox that would-be planners of the digital revolution face under the condition of technologically advanced capitalism.

As noted previously, some responses to the consciousness-structure paradox

108 have focused on using IT to link the technological capacity of the most developed capitalist regions (where the Happy Consciousness is prevalent) to the activated consciousnesses which are present in the some of the least developed regions. Fair enough, but we must account for the arrogance that this perspective holds. In as much as such a project might be framed in terms of social capital or human capital from a liberal perspective, framing it in terms of transnational solidarity does not free it of the presumption that Western know-how is the secret ingredient missing from the recipe for transformation. Alternately, given that the trajectory of technological innovation is determined by the powers associated most closely with the capitalist assemblage, the extent to which agitation in the peripheries would constitute a structural crisis that could not be somehow contained is not clear. Rather, what IT seems to represent in some regard, and this is because of the technical capacities (flexibility, multilinearity, etc.) it has developed, is a further increase in the frequency of rupture. Indeed, a great number of these ruptures will be effectively contained and returned to the assemblage, while many others will be relatively inconsequential from an enduring structural perspective.

However, that small remainder retains the potential for real transformative power, and as such, it is the task of those concerned with the linkage between technology and social transformation to seek out these rare instances.

109 3 The Political Economy of FOSS

If we are to look for sources of potential technological rupture in the first decade of the 21st century, our gaze is naturally drawn to the field of IT. Of course, there can be no stipulation that rupture may only occur within the scope of the dominant technological form for a given historical context (indeed there are many examples of new, even radical, appropriations of old technologies that could be cited: The use of a myriad of consumer waste products as construction materials perhaps?) However, it is with respect to the dominant technological form that any innovation, be it rupture or not, will be evaluated in terms of its usefulness, and ingenuity. Further, it will be those ruptures that are most closely linked to the dominant technological form that hold within them the most potential for directly confronting it's associated form of technological rationality. For these reasons, IT draws our attention in this matter at this time.

Notably, there is a period in the life of almost every form of technology during

110 which the many potentialities within it are relatively visible, and none has been established as the primary logic that will guide future innovation. This is the case because infant technologies have not yet been fully integrated into the socio- technical apparatus, and as such, how the prevailing technological rationality will be applied becomes a contested terrain. Accordingly, looking at the origins of

IT proves extremely fruitful in the search for the potentialities that continue to exist within it but are subsumed under the dominant technological rationality.

For most, where the IT development and innovation processes are concerned, their perspectives are dominated by large corporations - capital. As such, the logic of capital has, for the most part, been accepted as the common sense driving

IT production: Hardware and software are produced by waged labour for an individual capital whose choice to produce such-and-such a good or service is a calculated response to the demand of the market, and whose impetus to engage in production is given by its ability to extract a return on its investment contingent upon its ability to transfer ownership of some perceived utility bound up in a good or service from itself to the consumer in the act of exchange. Of course, where the rubber hits the road, theory often loses its purity and its constituent concepts begin to get fuzzy around the edge - or worse. This disjuncture between economic theory and practice is particularly salient to the discussion of capital's

111 appropriation of IT, as the boundaries traditionally used to delineate property have proved to map poorly to immaterial and informational goods and services such as software. What is more curious about the origins of IT however, and particularly the production of software, is that this logic of capital was not the logic of production upon which much early critical innovation was carried out.

Specifically, exclusive proprietorship of software, and use of the market for its distribution, were concepts that were deemed antithetical to the development process of IT by many key players in its early history. Moreover, as capital began colonizing the IT space more actively, and markets were built around it, some of the proponents of this earlier logic of production chose not to go gently into that good night, but rather became vocal critics of proprietary forms of software and advocates for an alternate form of Free Software.

Over 25 years on, the concept of Free Software has not disappeared. In fact, it has grown considerably, though the concept is now stretched across two categories: Free Software (FS) and Open Source Software (OSS) - both of which are premised on a challenge to conventional understandings of proprietorship where software is concerned. Most intriguing though is the fact that Free and

Open Source Software (FOSS) continues to achieve considerable success in the software field - in terms of the pace and scope of its development, as well as its

112 adoption rate among users - relative to its proprietary counterparts, and further, has begun to attract considerable interest from capital that had been wed to the more traditional notions of proprietorship in software development. This shift has inspired many across the ideological spectrum to wonder whether or not some kind of seachange is underway in the world of software production.

Does FOSS represent the dissolution of the logic of capital, it's extension, or it's refinement? From the standpoint of a materialist theory of technology, in answering these questions we can expect to see no absolute affirmations in any regard. Rather, what we can expect to find are the potentialities upon which rupture might be founded or reigned in. Given, the preceding discussion of technological rationality, it seems that we are most likely to find the latter; indeed, the evolution of the concept of FOSS (and specifically the evolution of the concept of Open Source), does seem to incline to the extension rather than the refinement, or dissolution of capitalist rationality. In fact, the colonization by capital of the FOSS concept and its associated movement in the field of IT exemplifies the kind of reigning in of lines of flight discussed previously. Nonetheless, the rapid pace of technological change within the field of IT, the fact that traditional conceptualizations of property map poorly to informational goods and services, and the fact that FOSS takes aim at this mismatch, yet turns out also to be a

113 very much internally conflicted and contested concept, suggests that FOSS might yet yield up potentialities upon which positive, non-repressive, forms of rupture might be founded.

3.1 A Brief History of FOSS

As stated at the outset of this section, the history of the evolution of FOSS is closely tied to the history of the development of IT in general, and particularly to that period from the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s when computer systems were being introduced into American academic institutions as research instruments. Compared to contemporary personal computers, the computers of this period were relatively arcane (requiring considerable technical and scientific skill to operate effectively), and exponentially more expensive (far beyond the reach of any average consumer). Among the universities and research institu­ tions that possessed them, the preferred operating system (OS) for these ma­ chines, the most prevalent of which were probably the PDP series produced by

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), was the Unix OS developed by AT&T at it's Bell Laboratories. Due to an earlier antitrust law suit brought against

AT&T, the company's sphere of operations was defined as pertaining primarily to telecommunications carriage services, and for this reason it was essentially

114 forced not to pursue the commercialization of the Unix OS.161 For this reason, the Unix OS, while covered under a license stipulating AT&T's ownership of the code, was distributed to these institutions free of charge, with its uncompiled source code included. This last point is key.

An application's source code is composed in a human readable programming language (such as C). In this state, source code is unreadable by a computer, and therefore non-executable.162 In order for a computer to be able to comprehend a program, it must be translated into the native binary language of the computer by a compiler (itself a program). In it's compiled form, a program, while readable by a computer, is rendered effectively unreadable to human eyes. As such, AT&T's choice to ship Unix with its source code allowed programmers to inspect and modify the code as they saw fit. In light of AT&T's inability to marshal Unix as a viable revenue stream, modification of the code that it owned was tolerated by the company on the condition that Unix was provided with no guarantees, or support (i.e. AT&T was 'happy' to distribute Unix so long as an essentially zero-sum outcome could be achieved with respect to it's bottom-line).

The Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of Califor­ nia, Berkley made substantial revisions and additions to the AT&T source code and produced an alternate distribution of Unix referred to as the Berkley Software

115 Distribution (BSD). Throughout this period, and into the 1980's the popularity of the Unix OS grew, and following a second antitrust judgment, AT&T was freed from the restrictions that had barred it from commercializing Unix, and as such, pursued direct commercialization of its popular OS by restricting access to the source code, and imposing a steep licensing fee. In response, the CSRG bundled together the code it had added to the AT&T code base, replaced the outstanding AT&T code with its own, and released 386/BSD, which could be run on a personal computer as opposed to the massive workstations where the Unix development process began, and which subsequently gave rise to a series of other

BSD releases. Critically, 386/BSD and further BSD releases were covered under an extremely permissive license which placed no strong stipulations on how the code could be modified, extended, or redistributed. This allowed third parties to commercialize the BSD code, and throughout the 1980s many competing propri­ etary distributions of Unix emerged - some derived from the BSD code base, and others (notably Sun's SunOS or Solaris OS) from the AT&T code base which was now strictly protected by AT&T.

Against the backdrop of the developing market for the Unix OSs and the relatively powerful computer systems they were designed to run on, equally im­ portant developments were occurring in the fledgling Personal Computer (PC)163

116 hardware and software markets. The most notable episode in this parallel story probably involves the Homebrew Computer Club which was formed by a group of early computer enthusiasts around the Altair 8800. Compared to it's larger counterparts in the labs at Berkley and elsewhere, the Altair was quite afford­ able (it was in fact a commercial success initially), though like it's counterparts, effectively operating it demanded a rather arcane kind of knowledge. This aspect of technical complexity, shared by both the Unix computers and the PCs, is an essential element in understanding why early software development proceeded the way it did.164

The steep technical demands associated with the process of software develop­ ment in the early years of computing naturally meant that there were few people available to actually work on software. This lacuna in technical know-how was further exacerbated by the steep price tags attached to computing hardware. The systems towards which Unix was initially oriented were considered relatively af­ fordable from the perspective of an institutional budget (and even then they were not cheap) though they were well out of the price range of the average consumer.

While the Altair was considerably more affordable, and oriented towards the av­ erage consumer, it was still a fairly pricey piece of hardware, whose price point really only made it attractive to hobbyists already oriented towards computers.

117 In the Unix oriented space, the negative impact this scarcity of resources could have had on IT development was largely mitigated by the fact that initially, and by way of what is essentially an accidental foray into the realm of OSs, AT&T was willing to distribute its Unix OS under' a license that allowed modification and extension. In the PC oriented space, the negative impact this scarcity of resources could have had on IT development was largely mitigated by the norms established within hobbyist communities regarding software distribution. With­ out software, computer hardware is not capable of fulfilling its intended use, and as such, PC enthusiasts routinely traded the software they had written or otherwise acquired among each other reflecting a mutual recognition that such exchanges increased the usability of their own hardware. In the Unix space this dynamic was interrupted by AT&T's move to commercialize its Unix offering by imposing more restrictive licensing terms (removing source code from the distri­ bution and forbidding modification etc.),165 though the potential disruption of this shift in licensing was overcome to some extent by the existence of the BSD offering and their associated permissive license. In the PC space, the interruption came earlier in the form of "an open letter to hobbyists."

One of the most popularly traded programs within hobbyist circles was a programming language called Altair BASIC that could be run on the Altair

118 system. Much of Altair BASIC'S popularity is explained by the fact that it was a programming language, and as such, facilitated the writing of other programs for the Altair. It was, however, a proprietary program, the rights to which were held by Micro-soft (now the ubiquitous Microsoft). Having noticed that there were many more copies of Altair BASIC circulating than had been sold, in

1976 Bill Gates issued his "open letter to hobbyists", in which he categorically defined the trading of software as theft, and reasoned that if the practice of the unregulated copying of software was allowed to continue to exist as a norm within the hobbyist community that the only incentive to actually produce software (i.e. monetary remuneration to the code's owner) would be destroyed and ultimately the community as a whole would suffer.166

To be sure, Gates' 'open letter' lacked the teeth that AT&T's re-enclosure of the Unix code base did. However, it was most certainly a sign of the times to come. By the mid 1980s Microsoft had established itself as the most ag­ gressive and successful producer of proprietary software designed to run on IBM compatible hardware, and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, both of whom had been members of the Homebrew Computer Club, had gone on to found Apple

Computers whose business model hinged on a tight coupling between proprietary software and the hardware it ran on. Long story short, the onset of the 1980s

119 saw a shift away from the laissez-faire cooperative model of software production which dominated the early days of IT development, towards one based on the assertion of strong copyrights and distribution via exchange in the market. This shift is very much in line with the traditional logic of capital, and correspondingly can be explained in terms of the successful commercialization of IT throughout this period culminating in the development of rapidly expanding markets around these technologies. However, while the proprietary model took root and gained success rapidly, acquiescence to it was far from complete.

In 1983 Richard Stallman, who was at the time working in the Artificial

Intelligence Lab at MIT, announced the the creation of the Gnu Project,167 for which the goal was the creation of the Gnu Operating System, which was to be

Unix compatible and free.168 Subsequently, in 1985 Stallman founded the Free

Software Foundation (FSF), and issued the "Gnu Manifesto", in which, under the section entitled "Why I Must Write GNU" Stallman states:

I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement. For years I worked within the Artificial Intelligence Lab to resist such tendencies and other inhospitalities, but eventually they had gone too far: I could not remain in an institution where such things are done for me against my will. So that I can continue to use computers without dishonor, I have

120 decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free. I have resigned from the AI lab-to deny MIT any legal excuse to prevent me from giving GNU away.169

There are a couple of things to note about this statement: First, is the strik­ ing tone of the statement overall. While Stallman does go on to make pointed economic and technical arguments about the relative efficiency of free software as opposed to its proprietary counterpart, his fundamental argument seems to hinge on an ethical claim.170 Second, and most importantly, Stallman's use of the term free itself obviously entails something more than a straightforward pecu­ niary claim. Indeed, for Stallman the concept of free as it is used with respect to free software is more closely linked to a notion of access and use. In this case, free should be taken to mean libre (which is why FOSS is also commonly referred to as FLOSS), as opposed to gratis.171 What mattered to Stallman was that people have an unrestricted right of access to the source code, as well as an unrestricted right to modify it as they saw fit. Pecuniary freedom was a necessary, though fundamentally secondary aspect of this desired form of freedom.172 In order to facilitate this goal, in 1989 Stallman created an ingenious licensing scheme in the form of the Gnu General Public License (GPL). Essentially, any work licensed under the GPL is recognized as the original work of its author, but on the con-

121 dition that source code for the work must remain accessible to those who desire it, and further, that modification of, and derivation from, the work by others is completely allowed. This last aspect of the GPL is extended considerably by what is often termed 'the viral clause', which rests principally in section four of its terms and conditions, stating: You may not copy, modify, sublicense, distribute or transfer the Pro­ gram except as expressly provided under this General Public Li­ cense. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense, distribute or transfer the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights to use the Program under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights to use copies, from you under this Gen­ eral Public License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.173

What this viral clause accomplishes is the propagation of the GPL to all derivative works, without denying the original author 'ownership' of their own unique contribution. Here, however, ownership is conceptualized in terms of exclusive recognition, rather than the right to exclude others from access or use.174

In this sense, Stallman's GPL inverts the traditional notion of copyright, and for this reason, he coined his innovation copyleft. What Stallman had aimed at, and essentially accomplished, in composing the GPL was the formal codification of what he took to be the norms relating to how software was produced and distributed which prevailed among researchers, academics, and hobbyists in the early years of IT's development process. However, while producing the GPL was

122 a tremendous accomplishment, by the time of its publication, the Gnu Project had failed to produce its Gnu Operating System. While Gnu had produced a wide array of essential applications that would make up the bulk of an OS, what it lacked was the critical element of any OS that ties everything together into a cohesive system - a kernel.

In 1991 in Helsinki Finland a software engineering student named Linus Tor- valds had been working with an OS named MINIX (a Unix like OS aimed at

PCs) which was intended to be an educational aid, and had set out to create a few applications that he felt might be worthwhile. However, as Torvalds' work progressed he realized he was essentially working towards creating an entirely new

OS. Feeling that he wouldn't be able to complete this task on his own, he posted a request for help and feedback on his work in a MINIX newsgroup. Torvalds' request was eagerly taken up, and within a few months this group of volunteers, scattered across the Internet, had produced a functioning kernel named Linux, which was then placed under the GPL. The addition of the Linux kernel to the array of applications already created through the Gnu Project, and covered under the GPL completed the formal requirements for creating a fully functional OS, and since 1991, numerous distributions175 of Linux have emerged.

In his open letter, Gates had claimed that nobody would produce useful soft-

123 ware for free. In his manifesto Stallman refuted this claim, suggesting that many programmers would program simply for the love of the act itself.176 In 1991, Tor­ valds seems to have confirmed Stallman's claim. Yet Microsoft's products were dominating the desktop PC market, and the average computer user had probably never even heard of Linux. The story was quite different in the server and large workstation market however.

At the time Linux arrived, the servers that were managing the Internet, and the large workstations tied to research and academic institutes, were primarily descendants of the machines for which the Unix OS had been developed. As such, outside of the PC market, Unix and Unix-compatible OSs dominated, and for this reason, Linux was adopted relatively quickly in this space. Moreover, the technocrati that had been closely tied to the development of the most critical aspects of IT, specifically the foundational technologies of the Internet itself, had cut their teeth on this technology in the early years of its development, and within the various academic and research communities, where norms of non-exclusive proprietorship and cooperation had prevailed. Further, and with respect to this last point, much of the technological mindshare affiliated with commoditized IT was also personally connected to the free software movement. In fact, most of the critical software that managed (and continues to manage) the Internet emerged

124 from the free software (and subsequently, FOSS) movement through the work of these individuals, and was covered under the GPL or some other similar free licensing scheme.177

As software covered under free licensing schemes continued to gain success, there was a growing concern among some members within the FOSS movement that real success might never be realized without business buying-in to the idea of free. Eric Raymond, in particular saw the term free, and its associated ideology, as an insurmountable obstacle to the adoption of FOSS into the business world, and therefore, a hard limit on its ultimate success. As such, in 1998, during a meeting between representatives from Netscape (who produced one of the most popular world wide web browsers at the time) and a group of representatives with experience in the free software movement, the term open source was adopted as an alternative to the term free. Eric Raymond, present at this meeting, and perhaps the most prevalent advocate for OSS, outlined the rationale for this semantic shift in terms of shedding the "communistic" overtones of the concept of free, with the explicit intent of "[capturing] the fortune 500."178

The emergence of OSS and it's ideological divergence from FS represents something of a schism within the community of contributors to these sorts of projects, though the difference is often linguistically suppressed by the term FOSS

125 which combines both. It is also worth noting that Richard Stallman, despite his central position within the free software movement, was not invited to the meeting from which the concept of open source emerged. Regardless, this semantic and ideological shift proved to be a success, and the concept of open source began to gain serious traction. Open source quickly became a buzz-word within business communities, and a wealth of new software was developed under its banner.

In parallel to the FSF, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) was created in 1998 to act as a sort of loose governing body for the open source community. Unlike the FSF, which advocated for the use of a single family of licenses (all based around the GPL), the OSI governed over a growing body of licenses deemed compatible with the open standards set out in "The Open Source Definition."179

While the GPL is listed as a compatible license by the OSI's standards, the

OSI also recognizes many more licenses which are more reminiscent of the BSD licensing scheme - the BSD licenses are also recognized by the OSI. Essentially, among the licenses recognized by the OSI, what distinguishes one license from another is the way in which modifications, contributions, derivations, or inclusions are handled with respect to the proprietary statuses of the original and resultant code - the critical distinction being that where the GPL forces subsequent works to be free, many open source licenses recognized by the OSI do not.

126 Since the initial release of Linux, and the emergence of the open source con­ cept, FOSS has made considerable in-roads into business, and even the personal computing market. The most successful web and email server software continues to be that provided by the FOSS community, and FOSS applications, notably in the areas of database software and business productivity software, are increas­ ingly presenting themselves as credible alternatives to proprietary offerings. The adoption of Linux as an OS for PCs also continues to grow, challenging the dom­ ination of Microsoft's Windows offering.180 Moreover, the pace of FOSS develop­ ment, and the quality of the software produced, has reached, and even exceeded the standards set by proprietary alternatives. Much of this is attributed to the distributed, and largely volunteer based, development model, which presented itself in embryonic form during the first development cycle of Linux, and it is this level of productivity that has captured the imagination of many businesses.

Nonetheless, while the open source concept seems to have gained traction by attempting to cast off the ideological connotations of its free progenitor, the free software movement persists, maintaining a perspective that is seemingly antago­ nistic to capital operating within the software market. Yet it must be noted that neither Stallman, nor Raymond ever claimed that their respective projects took objection to the notion of private property. Regardless of Raymond's character-

127 ization of the free software ethic as 'communistic', Stallman never claimed that his concept posed a challenge to private property, and in fact, speaks directly to possibilities for its monetization in "The Gnu Manifesto." Yet, FOSS, at least in theory, seems predicated on redefinition of the concept of intellectual property that works against the interests of capital, and further, relies on a labour process which (to a point) is not predicated on waged labour, or capital discipline. De­ spite what Stallman or Raymond might say, OSS, and FS in particular, appear as the sort of fertile soil in which some anticapitalist tendency might germinate.

In 2001, Manuel DeLanda reflected on just this sort of possibility, suggesting that where open source is concerned, we are "[bjetter to learn the lessons of un­ intended consequences."181 But DeLanda also conditonalized his claim, pointing out that inasmuch as FOSS might hold some sort of anticapitalist potential, it was still a very young concept, and it might just as easily amount to nothing

- or worse. In making this conditionalization, Delanda stresses the sort of non- determinate dialectical view that must sit at the core of a materialist theory of technology. Moreover, the passage of a little more time has given us a slightly higher vantage point over the matter, and from here it appears that DeLanda's hesitation was probably warranted. FOSS has not emerged as some sort of life- spring for anticapitalist sentiment - in fact, in many regards it often seems to

128 give rise to even more exaggerated expressions of capitalism's basic tenets. More concretely, we can point to the fact that since the popularization of the open source concept, and the advent of Linux, not only have a slough of companies emerged that base their revenue models principally on FOSS offerings (Red Hat being the archetype in this case), but some of the largest and most well estab­ lished proprietary software companies (IBM and Sun Microsystems being among the most visible) have begun to contribute directly to FOSS projects and/or have actually relicensed once proprietary code under an 'open' licence.

The colonization of the FOSS space by capital is the most obvious phe­ nomenon that suggests FOSS will not become the terrain of anticapitalist strug­ gle. However, explaining how capital has ameliorated its goal - accumulation - with the production of a thing that seems to explicitly work against this goal, will require a more detailed examination. In making such an examination, we will not cast away the possibility that there are meaningful anticapitalist tendencies at play in the FOSS space - to do so would be to err in the opposite direction.

Rather, we will reserve the investigation of these emancipatory possibilities until after the economic instruments by which capital turns the productive power of

FOSS towards its own end have been laid bare. Keeping in mind that the power to enslave or free never lies in simple economic machinations alone, but also in the

129 social relations in which they are embedded, we turn first to the machinations.

3.2 The Commodity Status of FOSS

As Marx famously stated at the outset of Capital, the commodity constitutes the elementary form of capitalist society, and as such, from the standpoint of political economy, the analysis of FOSS requires a critical inquiry into its status as a commodity.182 For Marx, whether or not something can rightly be considered a commodity is contingent upon it being produced for the purpose of exchange, and therefore possessing an exchange value. This presupposes prevailing capitalist social relations by which things, and people, are related to one another through the medium of exchange, a fact necessitated by the imposition of a social division of labour combined with a system of waged labour, whereby use values produced by workers must be exchanged due to the separation of the worker from her means of subsistence.183 As such, commodities are socially produced use values distributed via the exchange mechanism. By this very precise definition, much of

FOSS seemingly falls outside of the realm of commodities, most obviously for the fact that FOSS tends to be free in the pecuniary sense. Thus, FOSS is assigned no exchange value and is distributed outside of the sphere of exchange. However, as it turns out, this pecuniary freedom should more rightly be considered a tendency,

130 rather than a concrete feature of FOSS.

As noted, though there is an ethical distinction between the FS copyleft and

OSS approaches that are (uncomfortably) consolidated in the notion of FOSS, and this distinction speaks directly to the extent to which the licensor feels that their work should be commercially appropriable, with few exceptions neither category of license outrightly prohibits the direct commodification of the software it covers. Moreover, there has been, and continues to be, a rapid proliferation of open source licenses, and as such, the extent to which a FOSS project might be directly commodified is highly variable depending on the license in question.

Additionally, the license proliferation problem is further compounded by the fact that FOSS projects, as well as standard proprietary software projects, are often composite in nature - incorporating elements from other projects - and as such, it is entirely possible that a piece of software (whether purely FOSS or not) is actually covered by multiple licenses corresponding to its various component parts.

The issue we encounter in this case, however, is that commodities appear in the market as unified wholes, and never as easily decomposed composites.

That commodities are in fact indissoluble agglomerations of other commodities

(and potentially non-commodities) points to the fact that capitalism is not, in

131 simple quantitative terms, defined by the dominance of capital, either politically or economically, but rather, is defined qualitatively by the social relations which define the entire social unit.184

3.2.1 The Extent of the Commodity Landscape

In theorizing late capitalism as a society of the spectacle, DeBord notes that the spectacle appears simultaneously with the total commodity.185 The total com­ modity thus serves as both the material substratum for, and product of the au­ tonomous spectacle - the cultural expression of the commodity fetish. Debord's preliminary claim of total commoditization is also expressed, to a lesser extent, in the Autonomist notion of the social factory, which posits the extension of the logic of capitalist production to all facets of life.186 Both of these concepts build on Marx's notion of real subsumption, and are useful in this consideration because they explicitly recognize the immensity of the commodity landscape, and resist flippant claims that things can be decommodified without significant struggle, while also linking the conceptual development of the commodity to the material development of capitalism in general and technology in particular.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Marx's notion of real subsumption is the fact that it is dualistic: Firstly, real subsumption describes a technical shift

132 pertaining to the onset of a full fledged factory system, which now also entails the development of the means of production by which the labour process is deterrito- rialized, and by which culture is commoditized. Additionally, real subsumption describes the persistent orientation of the subject's conscience towards the ends determined by the logic of capital. This dual character of real subsumption, and specifically the latter normative dimension, is intimated in Marx's assertion that, once established, the process of real subsumption begins to exceed its merely formal-economic character. This intensification of the process of real subsump­ tion entails a more complete subsumption of both industries which up until this point are only formally subsumed, as well as those that have already succumbed to this same process. In the latter case, this manifests as the continuous rev- olutionization of the methods of production.187 It is this ongoing revolution in the methods of production that is critical to understanding the process of real subsumption, as it entails a formal transformation (which we can conceptual­ ize in terms of the spatial, temporal, and material-technological dimensions of the labour process) of the labour process, as well as a normative transformation within the worker herself, and in society as a whole, which manifests as a reorien­ tation of activities formally considered to be performed outside of work towards the production of commodities. We can begin to derive this last point from a

133 fairly lengthy passage that Marx leaves us in the appendix to Capital, volume 1: The social productive forces of labour, or the productive forces of directly social, socialized (i.e. collective) labour come into being through co-operation, division of labour within the workshop, the use of machinery, and in general the transformation of production by the conscious use of the sciences, of mechanics, chemistry, etc. for specific ends, technology, etc. and similarity, through the enormous increase of scale corresponding to such developments (for it is only socialized labour that is capable of applying the general products of human development, such as mathematics, to the immediate processes of production; and, conversely, progress in these sciences presupposes a certain level of material production). This entire development of the productive forces of socialized labour (in contrast to the more or less isolated labour of individuals), and together with it the use of science (the general product of social development), in the immediate process of production, takes the form of the productive power of capital. It does not appear as the productive power of labour, or even of that part of it that is identical with capital. And least of all does it ap­ pear as the productive power either of the individual worker or of the workers joined together in the process of production. The mystifica­ tion implicit in the relations of capital as a whole is greatly intensified here, far beyond the point it had reached or could have reached in the merely formal subsumption of labour under capital. On the other hand, we here find a striking illustration of the historic signifcance of capitalist production in its specific form - the transmutation of the immediate process of production itself and the development of the social forces of production of labour.188

What is of critical importance in the preceding passage is Marx's develop­ ment of the concept of socialized labour (which reflects a trope established in

Grudrisse), and its linkage to capital as a whole within the processes of accumu­ lation. It is the greatly intensified mystification of the interrelationship between socialized labour and capital as a whole that speaks to the normative dimension of

134 real subsumption, and further, links it in an intermediating (i.e. non-determinate) relationship within the material processes of technological innovation, and there­ fore with respect to the development of the forces of production. Following the argumentation set out in the first part of this work then, what Marx identifies in this passage is the presence of a nascent technological rationality within the process of real subsumption. In his preface to the appendix to Capital, volume

1, Ernest Mandel arrives at a similar conclusion, stating: ... capital, rather than adapting itself to a given structure of de­ mand or socially acknowledged needs, by revolutionizing production, revolutionizes demands and needs themselves, expanding markets, provoking new needs, creating new products and new spheres into which production of exchange values for more value, production for profit, makes its appearance.189

It is precisely this manipulation and manufacture of needs that constitutes the normative dimension of real subsumption. For Marcuse, this interaction of capital with social need suggests an expansion of false needs (superficially gratifying), and their commensurate marginalization of true needs (vitally necessary), a process that sustains the appearance of never ending scarcity, which is a prerequisite for sustaining an ever expanding market, and also is indicative of a developing condition of one-dimensionality.190 Moreover, as capitalism develops, new forms of productive activity arise which are in fact fundamentally concerned with the maintenance and intensification of the process of real subsumption through the

135 continued development of its disciplinary and spectacular forms (most obviously within the culture industry). Thus, real subsumption describes the extension of the formal character of the factory to an expanding share of society beyond the factory walls, as well as the ongoing internalization of the logic of capital. These are in fact processes which insist on one another.

Given the dual character of real subsumption, we are in error if we seek out a definition of commodities based on the discrete activity of a particular capital.

Rather, and as Marx asserts, under the terms of real subsumption the activity of commodity production becomes the total activity of society. As such, just as the commodity cannot be apprehended from the vantage point of the individual capital, neither may it be apprehended from the vantage point of the individual labourer. Under the terms of real subsumption, the labour of commodity produc­ tion assumes its social, collective form, thereby incorporating disparate forms of labour into an integrated process of production.191 In particular, real subsump­ tion entails the social appropriation of scientific and academic work which might otherwise be considered unproductive. What is sought in the social appropria­ tion of the apparatuses for knowledge and technology production is an absolute increase in the foundational elements of scientific and technological innovation upon which capital as a whole builds the machinery of accumulation. Thus,

136 real subsumption describes the state in which the development of knowledge and technology at a social level is useful not to one specific capital, but to all capital.

DeBord's notion of the spectacle speaks to a condition in which both the total productive and consumptive behaviour of the individual has become alienated, and as such, all life activity is understood in no terms other than those specific to the commodity form. To the extent that the spectacle then corresponds with the emergence of a mature (i.e. socialized) apparatus of accumulation, DeBord is concerned with the spread, and subsuming function, of technology with special emphasis placed on technologies concerned with the production and consumption of culture and information - which we can understand in terms of the manufacture and manipulation of need. Accordingly, capital's ongoing appropriation of spheres of life presumed external to the process of capital reproduction describes the ex­ pansion of the site of value production, not unlike the Autonomist notion of the social factory. Thus, in the total commodity the distinction between productive and unproductive labour becomes blurred, though the total commodity's inter­ nal machinations are always focused on securing, and enlarging its own existence.

However, in drawing out the rabidity of the process of real subsumption, DeBord's notion of the spectacle exceeds real subsumption, and in doing so potentially abol­ ishes the distinction between productive and unproductive labour. Conversely,

137 Braverman has noted that "the greater the mass of capital, the greater the mass of unproductive activities which serve only the diversion of this surplus and its distribution among various capitals."192 Thus, Braverman is less willing to devi­ ate from earlier formulations of the productive-unproductive labour distinction, and therefore what properly constitutes a commodity, and rather suggests that the expansion of the accumulative apparatus entials a growing complement of necessary, but unproductive labour. However, inasmuch as DeBord's claim of total commodification is perhaps exagerated, Braverman potentially imposes too rigid a delineation between productive and unproductive forms of labour, which is particularity problematic when we attempt to examine information produc­ tion in the context of the information economy. For Braverman, the onset of real subsumption is driven by a necessity that capital imposes on itself by con­ stantly increasing the complexity of the methods and means of production and circulation - thereby demanding increasingly sophisticated techniques of value appropriation. Marx's discussion of the costs of circulation touches on this mat­ ter, and it is critical to note that Marx, in discussing the role of transportation industries in the process of value production, treats labour as productive if it is requisite for the actual realization of value through exchange, regardless of whether or not it is directly engaged in the transformation of use values (ie. the

138 literal act of production).193 Beyond the bare minimum ontological conditions that the value production-exchange relationship demands be met, what matters in this consideration is the understanding that value is not determinable until the moment of exchange, and as such, labouring activities which have a bear­ ing on the conditions of exchange are potentially (de)valorizing to the extent that they develop new use values in the commodity, alter the commodity's ex­ isting use values, subject the commodity to moral depreciation, etc. On this basis, Braverman's discussion of the expansion of the apparatus of accumulation is helpful for its maintenance of the productive-unproductive labour distinction, while DeBord's concept of the spectacle is helpful for its acknowledgement of the growing importance of new forms of labour that are interjected into the circuit of capital, particularity around the moment of exchange. What this implys re­ garding the extent of the commodity landscape then is that while the landscape of commodities is expanding at a rapid pace, and as such, pushing the realm of non-commodified life increasingly out of view, this assumption of an even more intensely socialized form, is premised on the expansion of both the categories of productive and unproductive labour.

Tessa Morris-Suzuki has proposed that we have entered a new phase of infor­ mation capitalism which is qualitatively different from its predecessor - industrial

139 capitalism - and, quoting from Marx's Grundrisse, is premised on the private ap­ propriation of "accumulated social knowledge." With respect to the increasing centrality of knowledge and information based goods, Morris-Suzuki reasons that this shift has occurred due to the fact that the consideration of information as a commodity is greatly problematized by the ambiguous relationship that infor­ mation and knowledge share with value (due to the immateriality of both, as well as the ephemeral processes of production that give rise to them), and thus, the commodification of information or knowledge is an inherently problematic proposition, demanding the extension of the accumulative framework into activi­ ties not traditionally associated with commodity production.194 The necessity of real subsumption is then imposed dually, both by the increasing technical com­ plexity of value production and appropriation, and by the elusiveness of value in the object which they set upon.

In considering the commodity status of FOSS then, what we find is that, as per Marx's definition, whether or not FOSS can strictly be considered a commod­ ity depends on it being exchanged, and this in turn is dependent on the license applied to the FOSS in question, the subjective impetus to commodity it, and how it stands in relation to other commodities. More importantly, however, and with respect to how FOSS stands in relation to other commodities, regardless of

140 whether or not FOSS is directly commodified, the condition of real subsumption suggests that it is likely an element within the larger social apparatus of commod­ ification and value production and appropriation. Understanding how FOSS is, or is not, commodified then requires that we understand how FOSS is related to the defining activity of capitalism: the production of value and its appropriation by capital.

3.2.2 The Value of FOSS

In considering the potential value product of FOSS, or for that matter any com­ modity, it is easy to infer the presence of value based on the simple fact of exchange. Such an inference is erroneous, however, as value is fundamentally the product of labour. In contrast, the moment of exchange is critical inasmuch as it is in this moment that the value of a commodity is determined, manifesting as a realized money price reflecting some portion of the extant value of the com­ modity.195 Moreover, as Braverman observed, "[t]he very same labour may be either productive or unproductive, depending on its social form."196 Thus, what matters when we are considering commodities, from the vantage point of labour within the production process, are not the specific functional or technical quali­ ties of work, but rather the orientation of the entire labour process itself towards

141 valorization (i.e. production of surplus value) and the realization of surplus value via exchange, which necessarily also distinguishes productive labour (valorizing) from non-productive labour (non-valorizing). As such, the labour invested in

FOSS offerings should be considered productive if it contributes directly to the production and/or realization of surplus value in commodities.

If we attempt to abstract FOSS away from its relation to other commodities, in many cases it would be considered non-commodified and therefore, the product of unproductive labour, to the extent that it often does not possess a realizable exchange value. However, even if this is the case, the use value of individual FOSS offerings often appear as functional equivalents, or at least very close functional approximations, of commercial software offerings. In this regard, to the extent that specific FOSS offerings can be considered substitutes for commercial software offerings, a potential decommodifying effect might be apprehended in FOSS. In this case, it is not just that the labour contributed to FOSS projects could be con­ sidered unproductive, but rather that it is in fact value destroying (i.e. produces no realizable exchange value in and of it self, and also displaces exchange value in other commodities with comparable use values).197 This potential destruction of value could occur for two reasons: First, if the commodity in question is counted as a consumer good, then the value of socially abstract necessary labour might

142 be reduced via a decrease in the quantity of value required to reproduce it (i.e. a decrease in the value of means of subsitence implies a decrease in the value cost of labour power). Second, if the commodity in question is counted as a capital good, then the value of certain types of constant capital might be reduced, resulting in a lesser transfer of value from the means of production throughout the production process. These reductions manifest in future iterations of the circuit of capital, and where the latter case is concerned, it is possible that the value reduction manifests only in specific industries, depending on the nature of the commodity in question. Regardless, this is the logical basis for the principle of moral de­ preciation, which establishes current value with respect to the current value of replacement in the market (i.e. socially), not with respect to the past value of production borne by a particular capital. Critically, the corollary of this claim also obtains: a use value produced under non-capitalist production relations, be­ comes commoditized when it is thrown into an exchange relationship along side comparable use values that were produced as commodities. Again, this obtains due to the fact that in the moment of exchange, the value of a commodity is determined with respect to the labour required to replace it. Thus, the character of the labour of replacement that must be considered along side the character of the labour of production, and as such, labour expended under capitalist produc-

143 tion relations and labour expended under non-capitalist production relations are able to become evaluative measures of one another in the moment of exchange.198

That such a transformation is possible derives from the fundamental assumption that in the sphere of exchange the commodity realizes its autonomous social (i.e. fetishized) form along side comparable use values.199 In this context, the nature of the production process that unleashed a specific commodity is subsumed in the nature of the socially dominant production process for that entire category of commodified use values. Immediately, the attempt to abstract FOSS away from its relation to other commodities collapses. The labour producing FOSS is valued in terms of the equivalent labour engaged in the production of comparable com- moditized use values, though FOSS may express this value either destructively or constructively depending on whether or not it is itself directly commodified.

The fact of the matter however is that most FOSS is not directly commodi­ fied. Curiously though, increasingly the same cannot be said for the labour that creates FOSS. While in its idealized form the FOSS phenomenon is often closely associated with a distributed and volunteer based production model, the propor­ tion of labour contributing to FOSS production that is provided on a waged basis appears to be increasing in step with capital's ongoing colonization of FOSS. As it stands, many FOSS contributors are in fact paid by their respective employers

144 to contribute to specific projects. 00 Additionally, some contribution is directly funded via various FOSS-oriented non-profit organizations (such as the Mozilla

Foundation). Thus, the terms on which labour is supplied to FOSS projects are heterogeneous. Notably, this heterogeneity in the terms of labour rendi­ tion does not necessarily map to the categories of work within a given FOSS project, though there is some speculation that commercial forays into FOSS pro­ duction have produced a rough division of labour, but rather to the individual contributors themselves (i.e. a given task might be performed by both waged and non-waged contributors).201

What we find then when we are considering FOSS is that it is in fact a highly conflicted entity within the capitalist apparatus of accumulation: simultaneously capable of being commodified, yet acting as a reactant of decommodification; consuming commodified wage labour, yet existing as the product of volunteerism.

In this regard, it is unsurprising that interpreters of the FOSS phenomenon have differed wildly in their assertions of what FOSS means in terms of the economic vitality of capitalism.

In 2002 David Wheeler undertook an attempt to estimate the equivalent cost involved in developing Red Hat Linux 7.1, and in 2008, Wheeler's method of estimation was again used by the Linux Foundation in its analysis of Fedora 9

145 (a successor version of Red Hat Linux). Based on the analysis of lines of code and salary figures for programmers reported by the US Bureau of Labor Statis­ tics, Wheeler determined the 2002 cost to be $1.2 billion (USD), while the Linux

Foundation determined the 2008 cost to be $10.8 billion (USD).202 It is critical to note here, however, that while Red Hat is in fact a profitable, and publicly traded corporation, its Linux offering does not serve as the corporation's primary direct revenue stream. Rather, Red Hat's revenues are primarily generated on commercial support and service subscriptions it offers for its products.203 In this respect, Red Hat's Linux offerings are treated as platforms to generate demand for commodified services. However, while Red Hat's Linux offerings do not tech­ nically reside within the OS market (because its principle mode of distribution is not via market exchange), they are functional equivalents (in general technical terms) to a host of proprietary offerings (notably those from Microsoft, Apple, and various Unix distributors) that do exist within the OS market. The fact that

Red Hat offers a functionally comparable product with a potential market value of $10.8 billion (USD) for free intuitively seems like it might present itself as a challenge to the commercial OS market in general. Indeed, in July 2009, in its

SEC 10-K filing, Microsoft listed, for the first time, Red Hat, and Canonical (the distributor of the increasingly popular Ubuntu distribution of Linux) as direct

146 competitors in emerging markets (most likely referring to Netbooks).204

Microsoft's naming of Red Hat and Canonical as direct competitors echoes an earlier concern that the corporation voiced in the so called Halloween Docu­ ments.205 Comprising eleven documents originally intended for internal viewing only (i.e. they were leaked to the public), the Halloween Documents emerged be­ tween 1998 and 2004 with individual document releases clustering roughly around the end of October. Overall, the documents provide an overview of the open source concept in general, identify it as a direct threat to Microsoft's revenue streams, and propose a series of strategies that might be employed to effectively compete with OSS offerings while also coopting the successful aspects of OSS development methodology. Perhaps the most interesting claim made however, and the claim which most concerned Eric Raymond, pertains to a competition strategy by which Microsoft would "de-commoditize [FOSS] protocols and ap­ plications." Microsoft's usage of the term de-commoditize is somewhat peculiar here, as it refers to OSS projects.206 This strategy of de-commoditization can roughly be summed up as the dual process of appropriating the useful work of

OSS projects and then binding it up with proprietary code in such a way that it cannot be reintegrated into OSS.207 The success of such a strategy then hinges on

Microsoft's ability to effectively market its proprietary alternative, establishing it

147 as a standard to which compliance via emulation would be an impossibility (due to its protected source), thereby shutting OSS alternatives out.208

In April 2008 a five year study into the impact that OSS was having on the software market concluded that: "Open Source software is raising havoc through­ out the software market. It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies."209 People ques­ tioning the conclusions of this report have emphasized findings from an alternate report sponsored by the Linux Foundation which suggests that the Linux ecosys­ tem generated $21 billion (USD) in 2007 alone, and as such, the claims of such a large net loss for the industry must be grossly overblown.210 Notably, the Linux

Foundation sponsored report also shows that within the aggregate spending of the

Linux ecosystem, the smallest proportion (by far) corresponds to direct spending on the Linux OS itself, while the largest proportions go to services related to

Linux and OSS, hardware, and applications (which may or may not be FOSS).

Thus, inasmuch as the Linux ecosystem may have generated $21 billion (USD) in

2007, very little of this can be directly linked to the production and consumption of Linux (or FOSS in general) as a commodity in its own right.

What we see emerging here then is a conflict between capitals heavily invested

148 in selling discretely commodified software (such as Microsoft), and capitals that use software as a platform on which alternate revenue streams might be erected

(such as Red Hat), or use software as a needed, though secondary component, for some other commodity (such as IBM). As such, for capitals that seek to pro­ ductively harness FOSS, FOSS enters the circuit of capital as constant capital, though the labour producing it is not counted as variable capital. For this reason,

FOSS fits neatly into the interests of these capitals, and assumes a commodity status by virtue of its location within the larger chain of commodity production

- terminating in the commodification of some other use value. Simultaneously,

FOSS also appears as a potential vector for decommodification, to the extent that it presents itself as a challenge to software use values that are discretely monetized. Taken together, these two movements constitute the sum total move­ ment of a general trend in capitalism whereby capital turns upon itself in order to maintain the integrity of the greater accumulative apparatus. This is not a co­ ordinated effort on the part of capital, but rather the natural outcome of choices and actions made independently by individual capitals, and consolidated by a common profit motive.211

149 3.3 FOSS and the Logic of Capital

The onset of concerted IT development in the 1960s corresponds directly with the emergence of what would come to be referred to variously as the new economy, the information economy, or any number of other epithets by the 1980s. Compared to the preceding Fordist era of production which emphasized the development of traditional industrial commodities, information became the focus of the new economy. While the harnessing of information in the service of capital accumula­ tion, and the production of information as a commodity in and of itself, were by no means new to economic thought (ex. the media and entertainment industries are classic examples that obviously predate this period), the rapidly increasing importance of information within the capitalist productive assembly placed in­ creased stress "on the neoclassical theoretical models that were employed to justify certain critical features of the new economy's market - specifically information commodities and intellectual property rights.

3.3.1 Non-Rivalry and Efficiency

The challenges that the information commodity presents for the neoclassical eco­ nomic theory issue forth from the immateriality of information itself, and specifi­ cally, from the implications that the notion of immateriality has on the durability

150 and reproducibility of the information object. Barring consideration of record­ ing, duplication, and distribution media (i.e. abstracting away from the means by which information may be materially embodied), information is a curious commodity due to the fact that it can be replicated and transmitted without degrading the original commodity. As such, in economic parlance, information is considered nonrwal - meaning that the enjoyment (utility) of some fragment of information by one person is not degraded by the enjoyment of that same fragment of information (as an identical copy) by another person.212 What this means in more general terms is that the assumption of scarcity which drives the supply and demand mechanisms of the self-equilibrating market does not apply to information commodities simply because there is no penalty suffered, in terms of utility, in giving information away for free.

Of course, the cost of the distributional media must also be taken into con­ sideration, and on this basis, where the cost of distribution remains relatively high, the scarcity mechanic asserts itself. However, where the cost of duplica­ tion and distribution is low, when amortized across the full run of production for the information commodity in question, the marginal cost of production for that commodity effectively falls to zero.213 This is crucial, as conventional economic wisdom suggests that the allocatviely efficient price of a commodity (the price at

151 which it will be cleared from the market) is equal to its marginal cost of produc­ tion - theoretically implying that information commodities which bear minimal distributional costs should be free.

Prior to the emergence of the cheap digital technologies that enabled the mass consumption of personal computers and related information technologies, information production oriented towards mass consumption was dependent on extremely costly up front investments in productive capital, and substantial en­ during investments in methods and mediums of distribution. Yochai Benkler identifies this earlier form of information production, exemplified by traditional print media, television, and radio, as constituting the industrial information econ­ omy.214 Under this technical regime, information, despite its nonrival character, was protected by the high capital costs of mass media production and distribu­ tion which functioned as a barrier to entry into the market, and as such, firms were able to effectively commercialize information (i.e. convert it from a public to a private good). However, as information technologies, and most notably com­ munications technologies, became objects of mass consumption, the industrial information economy was displaced by the networked information economy.215

Whereas the high cost of capital associated with distribution had encouraged commercialization and capital concentration in the industrial information econ-

152 omy, the low cost of distribution, attributable principally to the development of the personal computer and the Internet, reversed these trends. While infor­ mation goods remained costly in terms of their initial production, reproduction and distribution became increasingly cheap, and as such, any benefit previously obtaining from economies of scale in distribution were effectively obliterated.216

The net effect here then is that, while the feasibility of non-market production of information in the industrial information economy was significantly limited (by high capital costs and the ability to extract a rent above the marginal cost), in the networked information economy, non-market production appears to present a more rational production model with respect to the theoretical foundations of capitalism.217 Yet, a quick survey of the contemporary state of affairs in the software development industry, or for that matter most productive enterprises oriented towards the production of information and cultural goods, reveals that non-market production is not the norm. In the face of declining technical bar­ riers to the effective decommodification of information, the maintenance of its commodity status comes increasingly to depend on the extraeconomic mecha­ nisms of the state, and specifically on various intellectual property rights regimes

(copyright, patents, etc.).

It should be noted that though the emphasis on economic and technical bar-

153 riers to entry into markets captures a critical aspect of the tendency towards capital centralization and concentration in the media industries, there is in fact a pro-cyclical dynamic between the onset of economic and technical barriers and intellectual property rights, and even at their early stages, the media industries were rabid proponents of intellectual property rights that would help secure their commercial success. Historically, the enactment of the 1710 Statute of Anne, which granted copyrights for a limited term to booksellers who had purchased the right or a share in a right from a work's author, marks the early, though incomplete, formalization of the concept of intellectual property rights in the

Anglo world. Crucially, this statute was intended to strike a balance between protecting the investment of London booksellers, while limiting their ability to monopolize (via the term limit) the industry to the detriment of Scotch book­ sellers in particular. However, in a frenzy of petitions from London booksellers, the contents of the statue were largely ignored or navigated around, and the legal conception of literary property generally reverted to that established through the common law that preexisted it, allowing London booksellers to assert what was essentially a perpetual right over the works they purchased from authors. Citing growing piracy in the bookselling industry, originating in Ireland, Scotland, Hol­ land, and (to a lesser degree) Wales, the 1769 case of Millar v. Taylor formalized

154 an extended term and higher penalty for the sale of unsanctioned copies, thereby strengthening the legal and economic position of London booksellers. This formal recognition of a relatively small, but economically powerful, group of booksellers angered Scotch booksellers as well as small English booksellers who benefited from the availability of cheaper copies not printed in London. In 1774, the Don­ aldson v. Becket case overturned the findings which emerged from Millar v.

Taylor, limiting copyright terms and putting an end to the claim that booksellers could claim a perpetual right over the works they purchased the publishing rights to.218 What is of great interest in the Donaldson v. Becket case, however, is the centrality of the argument that the author of the work always retains some right to the work, even after sale. This argument was put forward on the ontological grounds that, without the author, the work would not have existed in the first place, and further, that this is in fact a qualitative distinction that can be drawn between corporal and non-corporeal property.219 In this 65 year period then, what we observe is a well organized group of capitals that leverage their political and economic clout such that their domestic economic import becomes a basis for arguing the necessity of strong copyright, while simultaneously, strong copyright is sought as a basis for protecting and increasing their domestic economic import.

Extrapolating from this example - though economic and technical barriers to en-

155 try into markets are crucial to the consideration of intellectual property rights under the current conditions of the networked information economy, it would be a gross oversimplification to suggest that intellectual property rights were of little significance in the preceding industrial information economy. Rather, the diminution of economic and technical barriers to entry into markets that is char­ acteristic of some sectors of the networked information economy attenuates the role that intellectual property rights assume in our analysis to the extent that their relative importance increases in this context.

The case for intellectual property rights is relatively straight forward, though paradoxical in nature: given that allocative efficiency can only be attained in the market when a good is produced at its marginal cost, and given that the marginal cost of information is zero, information is only efficiently distributed in market when it is free, and as such, there is theoretically no incentive to pro­ duce information at all.220 Essentially, goods with a marginal cost of zero are subject to a systemic free rider effect. In this regard, intellectual property rights are justified on the grounds that they can strike a balance between grossly dis­ proportionate rents on the information produced, and no information production whatsoever. Static inefficiency is accepted (selling information above its marginal cost at one point in time), so that dynamic efficiency may be achieved (ensuring

156 that socially beneficial information will continue to be produced over time).221

Indeed, the entrenchment of intellectual property rights appears to coincide with the dismantling of technical barriers to entry into the information market, as the general tendency throughout the 20th century (at least in the United States) has been to extend and strengthen the terms of copyright and patents.222 Yet, while intellectual property rights are presumed to achieve some level of dynamic efficiency, whether or not the level attained can be presumed to be optimal must be questioned.

This sort of logic, which endorses a trade-off between static and dynamic effi­ ciency, reflects a game theoretic underpinning premised on a Prisoner's Dilemma

(PD) model (in which players can choose between strict individual property rights, or no property rights whatsoever). The logic of the PD model is also present in the the well known tragedy of the commons thesis - which is leveled critically at the concept of FOSS, and its proponents.223 The issue with the PD model, and in fact its essential lesson, is that while it generates a unique equi­ librium, the equilibrium generated is inferior to other potential outcomes (i.e. it is considered the most efficient achievable outcome though not the most ef­ ficient theoretical outcome). This reflects a theoretical constraint imposed by narrow economic thinking which demands a single, and relatively static, equi-

157 librium, bounded within a field of action in which all actors are of a singular instrumental and egoistic character, in order to make sense of its theoretical as­ sumptions. Alternate conclusions may be reached if games that accommodate multiple equilibria and more complex relationships are used.224 In this case, the motivations driving the production of the commodity in question are crucial to determining the relative efficiency of the regulatory regime governing the distri­ butional dynamics of the market. Likewise, the tragedy of the commons thesis tends only to hold under the condition that individuals are principally motivated by some pecuniary, or comparably operationalized, reward structure. However it is not always clear that such instrumental thinking can always be assumed to dominate the motivations driving productive activity - or any activity for that matter. With respect to FOSS in particular, the fact that contributor partic­ ipation motives appear to be spread across a spectrum delimited by seemingly altruistic volunteerism at one end, and instrumental monetary gain at the other, it seems likely that FOSS production exhibits an interaction between strategic complementaries, thereby suggesting possible multiple equilibria (i.e. people con­ tribute to FOSS for various reasons, and therefore, what is acceptable in terms of its distribution and use for one person may not be for another, despite the fact that both people contribute to the same body of work).225 The historical fact of

158 FOSS alone suggests that the PD model is inadequate for explaining the need for intellectual property rights with respect to software production.

The paradox at play here then is the inability of neoclassical economic the­ ory to reconcile apparently sufficient social demand with individual incentives to produce. This is a particularly difficult problem where information production is concerned because information possess the notable quality of being both the input and output of its own production processes, and as such, exhibits an on the shoulders of giants effect,226 meaning that erecting impediments to the acquisi­ tion of information will retard its overall production. This makes property-like exclusive rights less appealing where information is concerned, as they will tend to impede any process of cumulative development. Payments made today will always be too high (above the marginal cost of zero) for information produced yesterday. Given that today's information consumers will be tomorrow's informa­ tion producers this dynamic is highly problematic.227 The time lag here (between information produced at time t, and information consumed at t+1) is significant.

Given the still relatively high initial cost of information production, it might be argued that over a short enough time period the effective marginal cost of in­ formation may not yet have reached zero, and as such, in the immediate term, the marginal cost of information is above zero. Arguably, substantial first mover

159 returns obtain to information production (and software development in partic­ ular) due to rapid duplication and distribution technologies, and short product life cycles. In this regard, there is potentially some ground on which to justify the extension of property rights to information, in order to protect first mover advantage and reflecting the investment associated with initial production, but only in the very short term. Alternately, it might be argued that intellectual property rights designed to protect first mover advantage are unnecessary as the first mover will naturally enjoy a (potentially very short) period in which they can extract rents from the market while competitors play catch-up. Regardless, as mentioned earlier, at least in the US, the trend has been toward strengthen­ ing, and lengthening, rather than relaxing the protection afforded by intellectual property rights.228

The fact that information exhibits the dual character of being both input and output of its own production process speaks to the reason why this paradox concerning nonrival commodities and intellectual property rights must command so much attention. Quite simply, many (though obviously not all) informational goods fall into the category of means of production, and as such, constitute a por­ tion of the (im)material substratum from which all other commodities arise.229

Given the obviously central role that information plays in the information econ-

160 omy, this feature of information commodities explains the sufficient level of social demand for them, regardless of incentives to supply. As such, the matter of how information commodities can most efficiently be produced and distributed is cru­ cial, and the inability of neoclassical models to find a clearly most optimal solution to this problem, has left little recourse beyond the realm of intellectual property rights. It is with respect to this conundrum that the FOSS phenomenon has been analyzed by most mainstream economic thinkers.

While the potential decommodification effect of FOSS might seem like a crit­ ical consideration in this regard, from a neoclassical perspective, it is not. Unlike value theory, the neoclassical perspective has no concept of value as something distinct from utility (use value).230 Thus, neoclassical considerations in these mat­ ters are framed in terms of the satisfaction of individual preference with respect to a set of comparable utilities. Reflecting on what has been covered to this point, we can see that from a neoclassical perspective 1.) informational commodities tend to be priced inefficiently above their marginal cost, 2.) the inefficient pric­ ing of information implies an inherent inferiority in intellectual property rights schemes, and 3.) this inferiority speaks directly to how information is produced as a social utility. In light of these claims, it has been argued that the FOSS model of software production more closely adheres to neoclassical ideals than

161 the dominant commercial model, to the extent that the social costs (i.e. loss of utility) incurred by FOSS production (i.e. the destruction of some capital) are lesser than those incurred by models that rely on the enforcement of intellectual property rights.231

3.3.2 FOSS contra Monopoly

As has been established, the concept of market efficiency in the neoclassical per­ spective is operationalized in terms of the marginal cost of production coinciding with the price consumers are willing to pay at a level that clears the market.

Generally speaking, the realization of this sort of efficiency is undermined by any factor which prevents optimally competitive conditions, and specifically, factors associated with information transactions. To put it bluntly, once we move from the abstract realm of theory, to the concrete real world, the conditions ensuring theoretical optimality begin to falter. Realistically the number of specific fac­ tors that can impede, corrupt, or otherwise disrupt flows of information are too numerous, and far-ranging, to simply list off. However, generally speaking, the favourite theoretical culprit tends to be the presence of monopolies or oligopolies, which can leverage their tremendous productive capacity in a way that distorts market information, and/or otherwise diverges from the theoretical constraints

162 imposed by the need for efficiency.

When we consider the global software sector, pondering the possible existence of monopolistic or oligopolistic structures is an exercise in attempting to ignore the elephant in the room. Indeed, the sheer enormity of Microsoft, not just as a software producer, but as a corporate entity in any right, is a fact that is al­ most impossible to overlook. However, while Microsoft is enormous, it cannot technically be considered a monopoly. By current estimates Microsoft holds a

13.9% share in the application software market, and a 16.1% share in the sys­ tems software market. While this is a far cry from monopolizing the software manufacturing space, these figures must be considered relative to the other play­ ers in the market (see tables 3.1 and 3.2).232 Notably, Microsoft is nearly twice as large as its next largest competitor in the application software market, and con­ siderably larger than every other competitor outside of the top three positions.

In the systems software market, figures seem tighter, however it is also worth noting here that as of August 2009, the W3 Counter (which logs OS, hardware, and browser specific data obtained via polling Internet traffic) identifies 86.44% of all recorded Internet traffic as originating from computers running an OS pro­ duced by Microsoft.233 To be sure, this last fact is indicative only of Microsoft's success in selling its OS to web savvy consumers and to hardware manufactur-

163 Table (3.1): Global Market Share: Application Software

Microsoft 13.9%

SAP AG 6.8%

Oracle 6.7%

Other 72.6%

ers that resell this software with their products, and has nothing to do with database management systems, backup systems, or other middleware that falls into the systems software category. What this does speak to, however, is the ubiquity of Microsoft's OSs, and relatedly, the sort of popular mindshare that

Microsoft enjoys. It should also be noted that in each category, between 27.4% and 37.8% of these markets respectively, is staked by just three companies, with the smaller capitals laying claim to market shares many times smaller than those of the market leaders.

Generally speaking, the software offerings that these market leaders produce are complex and quite large. While entry into the software market in general is not necessarily impeded by any significant barriers,234 the software offerings that market leaders found their success upon are often extremely large and complex

164 Table (3.2): Global Market Share: System Software

Microsoft 16.1%

IBM 12%

Oracle 9.7%

SAP AG 2.9%

Other 59.4%

(such as OSs, Databases, Word Processors, and Business Management applica­ tions), demanding massive development and maintenance resources. A fledgling capital hoping to offer up a credibly competitive alternative to these sorts of soft­ ware commodities would require a massive initial capital outlay in order to get a first offering out the door, and would subsequently face an extremely large, and likely escalating overhead stemming from further development and maintenance demands which would obtain from the competitive pressure brought to bear on the new entrant by the better established capitals. Indeed, niche markets ex­ ist, and in these niches barriers to entry would be much lower, thereby making them accessible to small capitals and particularity new entrants. However, large software manufacturers, and particularity Microsoft, have routinely been criti-

165 cized/lauded for purchasing niche players that manage to establish themselves, thereby reinforcing the tendency towards monopoly, particularity in the system software market. Critically, this segment of the software market (which is prob­ ably most closely affiliated with the systems software industry), to which there are substantial barriers to entry and strong monopolistic tendencies, houses the productive activity concerned with producing the software which counts as means of production.

To be clear, while Microsoft is considered an industry success story, it is also probably the industry's favourite whipping boy. What matters here is not so much which company has risen to dominate the commercial software vista, but rather, that despite the lack of a monopoly in the purely technical sense, the structure of the software market is such that certain areas of production are potentially inaccessible to capitals beyond the small handful of already well established cap­ itals in the market. Further, the fact that these specific areas of productive activity are associated closely with the infrastructural components of software is critical, as software infrastructure imposes specific technical demands on the software that will run on top of it. Thus, the specific production choices made by that small group of well established capitals potentially propagates through­ out the entire software ecosystem, thereby creating a vendor lock-in problem (i.e.

166 proprietary software stimulates persistent dependency on a single vendor which ultimately acts as a constraint on autonomous individual productive creativity in the market).

What is interesting about the specific technical argument around the issue of lock-in, however, is how it is linked to the domain of private property. Stallman's take on this matter (though at a more general level) contains an interesting in­ terpretative manoeuver, claiming that the limitations on use and appropriation imposed by patent and copyright on software amount to an encroachment on the individual's ability to create their own private property.235 In recognition of this,

Steven Weber has suggested that Stallman's take on property rights (as presented in the preamble to the GPL) reflects an essentially Lockean approach to the con­ cept.236 To the extent that Stallman is concerned with the individual's right to mix their labour as they see fit (i.e. act productively without creative limitation)

Weber is correct, but the claim glosses over Locke's subsequent justification for unequal accumulation premised on the guarantee of exclusive property rights, which does not fit with Stallman's perspective at all.237 Rather, Stallman explic­ itly rejects any notion of exclusive property rights in the domain of software by rejecting the primacy of a individual natural right to property in general, in his work "Why Software Should Not Have Owners."238 In light of this, Stallman's no-

167 tion of property seems more closely aligned with Rousseau's, by which individual claims to exclusive property are subordinated to the community's claim on the grounds that the exclusivity of individual property is dependent on the will and power of the community which enforces this right, and as such, private property is guaranteed under the proviso that it first and foremost serves utility of the power that guarantees it - the community.239 For Stallman, the community good of technological innovation trumps individual pecuniary pursuits, and as such, the matters of technological innovation and capital accumulation are treated sep­ arately (though are not irreconcilable per se); for Locke, they are fundamentally interconnected.

The decoupling of the individual profit motive from the social process of tech­ nological innovation is problematic from a neoclassical perspective, which in its attempt to rationalize FOSS, has re-articulated the lock-in problem in terms of generating a negative spillover effect in the secondary software support and service market - reasoning that since proprietary software is necessarily linked to a sole vendor, it follows that the associated support and service market for that software will tend to be monopolized by that vendor as well. Alternately, in the case of FOSS, the assumption is that there is potential for a broad sup­ port and service market being created, as many people contribute to and possess

168 knowledge of a given technology. Moreover, we can assume that support and service markets also have lower barriers to entry, as up front costs and overheads demanded by software development are not present here, and as such, the poten­ tial for establishing competitive conditions which approach the theoretical ideal is considerably greater than in the software production market. According to this argument, the FOSS model, and specifically the creation of open standards, allows natural monopolies to form in a given technology, while ensuring full com­ petition among suppliers of that technology. In this case, the natural monopoly

(meaning a market entity which has achieved an economy of scale by virtue of its production process alone, indicating that its productive technique is the most efficient among available options) is the FOSS productive apparatus. Thus open standards may potentially separate a natural monopoly in a given technology from a monopoly in the supply of that technology (i.e. many suppliers derive their product or service from the established open standard), which is consid­ ered favourable, as opposed to where a natural monopoly has strong intellectual property rights protecting it, which can be exploited to give one producer an anti-competitive advantage.240 Put otherwise, the FOSS model of production is considered desirable because while it suspends commercial activity in one market space, in doing so it facilitates the emergence of a strongly competitive (therefore

169 efficient) environment in another, larger, market space. In this regard, from a neoclassical perspective, FOSS is a market rational phenomenon both in terms of a social process of technological innovation (i.e. fostering the continual devel­ opment of open technological standards), as well as the individual profit motive

(i.e. encouraging capital competition in secondary markets producing derivative products, and services for the established open technology).

Given the composition of global market for software and IT and Internet re­ lated services in 2008, the assumption that the services segments might comprise a larger market than the software production segment, is empirically verified (see table 3.3). Further, the IT and Internet services and software segments also exhibit a more competitive market structure, indicated by a tighter distribu­ tion of market share, compared to the Application and System software markets

(see table 3.4).241 In this regard, the basic assumptions presented in the con­ ventional economic rationale endorsing FOSS production appears quite sound, and correspondingly, the business models that fall into the FOSS orbit tend to conceptualize it as a strategically useful phenomenon rather than as a directly exploitable revenue stream.

170 Table (3.3): Composition of Global Market for Software, and IT & Internet Related Services

IT Services 46.9%

Internet Software and Services 36.9%

Software Production 16.5%

Table (3.4): Global Market Share IT and Internet Services and Software

Google 2.7%

France Telecom 2.2%

Yahoo 0.9%

AOL (Time Warner) 0.5%

Other 93.7%

171 3.3.3 The Cost FOSS

The business discourse around FOSS strategies has exhibited a considerable de­ gree of consistency since the emergence of FOSS (and specifically the more capital friendly OSS). As mentioned earlier, Stallman's early 'GNU Manifesto' notes the possibility of building support and service markets around free software, and this potential business strategy is echoed by Eric Raymond shortly after the establish­ ment of the open source concept.242 The relative soundness of this sort of business strategy can be reasoned out in terms of the total cost of ownership associated with FOSS. Of course most FOSS is free, and as such, the total cost of ownership associated with it derives from the maintenance and service requirements that a given piece of FOSS might entail - not the cost of the software itself. Without a dedicated support and service provider that has sound knowledge of the software in question, effectively deploying it can be a costly affair. This is obviously a critical matter for FOSS projects which are often organized as, or incorporate elements of, ad hoc networks of individual contributors. This makes the total cost of ownership associated with FOSS potentially very high, as there is no re­ liable source for support.243 However, it should be noted, that many proponents of FOSS advocate its use for precisely the opposite reason: that there are many free avenues for support available to FOSS users and developers in the form of

172 newsgroups, web forums, etc. In this regard, it is the reliability aspect of the support service that the ownership cost argument might best be founded on - the assumption being that a paid employee hired for their expertise is more likely to provide meaningful help, than an anonymous volunteer that posts to a web forum. The critical issue here then is actually how support services fare in terms of their risk management capacity.244

The concept of risk management, as applied to the software service and sup­ port market, is operationalized in simple economic terms, meaning that, the efficacy of a given support service is best estimated in terms of its price. Thus free support must be presumed to be inferior to a paid support service. This can be rationalized in terms of the structural composition of the support provider to some extent by contrasting the unregulated nature of the many online forums offering support for free to the regulated (via hiring practice and the structure of labour process) nature of paid support services offered by firms. The assumption here being that where support and service are concerned, the perceived quality of information is a function of its homogeneity as well as its accountability of its source. In these respects a diversity of opinions often provided under pseudonyms over online forums lacks the structural integrity, and therefore quality, of a sin­ gular opinion offered by a client services representative from a known, legally

173 recognized (and therefore accountable), firm.

The problematic aspects of accountability with respect to FOSS also extend beyond support and service provision to the more fundamental processes of FOSS development as well. Specifically, FOSS production is often considered a risky market space due to the fact that most licenses severely limit the extent to which an author can be held responsible for how their software is used or functions.

Again, the ad hoc, and distributed nature of the FOSS development space also compounds this problem, as development genealogies become increasingly obfus­ cated as contributors join and leave projects over time.245 Thus, FOSS is often treated as inherently risky as, in the total absence of firm activity, it lacks the motivational instruments deemed necessary for achieving efficient levels of pro­ ductivity while maintaining the quality of the product.

In 2003 the SCO Group brought a lawsuit against IBM claiming that IBM had contributed proprietary elements of SCO's Unix variant to the Linux development project. If SCO were successful in making its claim, not only would this wrest a sizable amount of code out of the Linux project, but it would also put many Linux users (most notably large corporations) in a precarious legal position regarding

SCO's intellectual property. This is precisely the sort of risk that is presumed to exist in FOSS projects due to the ambiguity of their development genealogies, and

174 it is precisely a consequence of this sort of perceived risk that Red Hat has since begun offering an insurance program on its Linux offerings that would limit the liability of Red Hat Linux users in similar cases. In this case the insurance policy, rather than the software itself, acts as a new revenue stream, and in fact a foray into a new market space for the company. The problem that enabled this shift on Red Hat's part, and gave rise to the SCO lawsuit, is a fundamental conflict in the interface, with respect to intellectual property rights, between markets dominated by firms, and a mode of non-market production often premised on ad hoc distributed volunteer networks. What is especially curious about this risky disjuncture is that while the risk problem is evoked as a rationale for rejecting firm based production in the software market (in terms of the lock-in problem),246 it is evoked as a rationale for accepting firm based production in the service and support market.

As we have seen, there are potentially very high barriers to entry in the soft­ ware market which provide the conditions by which it is possible to establish a monopoly in supply (or at least an oligopolistic market structure). In this re­ gard, the market on its own is not capable of guaranteeing efficient production in the software market, while it is more able to do so in the support and services market where barriers to entry are considerably lower. As such, demarketizing

175 software production should result in a decrease in capital expenditures on means of production so long as the total cost of ownership for software is cheaper using

FOSS alternatives to commercial offerings. The extent to which the total cost of ownership for FOSS will be lower than that for commercial software should be contingent upon the degree to which the support and service market is competi­ tive - which, as we have seen, appears quite high.247

3.3.4 The Price of Software

From a value theory standpoint, capital's potential turn to FOSS as redress to increasing barriers to entry, and monopolistic tendencies in the software produc­ tion industry, can be conceptualized in terms of how the escalating cost of means of production can act as a brake on market growth, and ultimately serve as a catalyst for capital centralization.248 What matters here, however, is not that any one capital in particular realizes a potential to grow to an enormous size, but rather, that the centralization tendency occurs simultaneously with the tendency for the value productive capacity of society to decline - expressed in the Law of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPF).249 This is because central­ ization is contingent upon the competitive success of a given capital, and this in turn implies an escalating organic composition of capital (OCC) in the given

176 industry as a consequence of competitive behaviour, and resultantly, a declining production of surplus value stemming from the ejection of living labour (the basis for all value production) from the labour process. FOSS is particularly interesting in the context of this discussion, as it simultaneously threatens value production in one industry while potentially enlarging the capacity for value production in other industries. What matters then, as far as a broad analysis of capitalism is concerned, is the net result of this double movement.

Conventional treatments of this dynamic have tended to fall back on the

Schumpeterian premise of creative destruction, and suggest that as an economic phenomenon, FOSS represents a shift in primary economic activity away from profit seeking via the production of primary utilities, towards profit seeking via value added business strategies. If this sounds confusing, it's because it is. In many respects, the concept of value added is amorphous, and alludes simply to the idea that additional value (read utility, therefore price) may be discov­ ered in already existing goods and services by appropriating them in new and creative ways. As Castells suggests, business strategies in the network society increasingly focus on the extension of already established core innovations. This process of extension is then linked to a general process of innovation, and as such, the value added strategy describes a process of making profit on the margin of

177 a larger social process of generalized technological and scientific innovation.250

This line of thought eventually leads Castells to postulate that synergy (another vexingly amorphous concept) is also an increasingly important source of value in the information economy.251 In this case, value is theoretically created simply by interaction among the users of a given technology.

The actual value of synergy can be explained in terms of the generation of a network effect or network externality, which describe a specific relationship between a good and its perceived utility, by which the utility of the good in­ creases by some factor determined by the number of people who use it, or its compliments.252 The reasoning here is straight-forward, and connects closely to the concept of standards and the problem with technological lock-in: Barring considerations of specialized requirements, if I am in the market for a word pro­ cessor, given the choice between an obscure option, and a popular option, I will likely choose the popular option due to considerations of compatibility. Like­ wise, if I am choosing between two programming environments, I will most likely choose the one for which there are more add-ons that will aid me in my work.

The network externality thus serves as a theoretical device which combines and multiplies utilities.

What makes the concepts of value added and synergy problematic is the

178 connection they imply exists (if only semantically) between an non-determinate form of social interaction and value production. In fact, with respect to the utility calculations of consumers, what the network externality describes, is not value production at all, but rather a shift in the pattern of social demand for a given commodity. This is a crucial assertion, as social demand constitutes one half of the mechanism of price determination - the other half being the structure of production.253 In this regard, where it is applicable, the network externality may in fact serve as an ex post justification for monopoly pricing, and this is precisely the crux of the debate upon which the economic arguments about FOSS are hinged: The assertion that intellectual property rights lead to the overpricing of non-rival information is perhaps a gross understatement in terms of neoclassical economic assumptions, inasmuch as while the non-rival character of information asserts a declining marginal cost - therefore price, the same characteristics which make information non-rival also incline it towards encountering a network ex­ ternality, and therefore an inclining utility - therefore price. Under conditions of competition, the latter inclining tendency would be curtailed, though establishing these conditions would entail abandoning the protection afforded by intellectual property rights, therefore decoupling price from utility. What this problem can be boiled down to is essentially the fact that intellectual property rights grant

179 information an economic character which is fundamentally at odds with its social character - treating it as an alienable material good when it is in fact a collectively held immaterial good.

The interplay of intellectual property rights, and the network externality thus result in an economic dynamic in the software production field not entirely dis­ similar to that examined by Marx in his treatment of rent. As Marx points out, when the formal distinction between landowner and farmer and/or capitalist be­ came a generalized social relation, this fact necessitated that the price of goods contain within it some component which constituted a payment from the farmer and/or capitalist to the landowner - rent.254 In this respect, the necessity of rent arises from dominant social relations, and specifically from the fact that the principle of private property when applied to land inevitably creates a monopoly on that land for its owner which enables her to exact tribute from those who de­ sire to use the land productively.255 Following Ricardo's lead, though addressing a number of perceived shortcomings in Ricardo's theory, Marx determines that the magnitude of rent is principally determined by the differential in soil fertility that exists across varying parcels of land (termed Differential Rent I), though this may be augmented by the relative intensity of capital investment in the land undertaken by the farmer and/or capitalist (termed Differential Rent II).

180 Given: A commodity's value (C) is equal to the sum of the value transmitted to it through the constant capital (c) consumed in its pro­ duction, as well as the value product of the variable capital employed in its production - consisting of a value equivalent to that needed to reproduce the variable capital (v) as well as a surplus value (s) beyond that. Or: C = c + v + s256

Further: Commodities exchange at their price of production (P), not their value. As such, constant (c) and variable (v) capital inputs for production are purchased on the market for their cost price (k), where k = c + v (where c and v are expressed in their prices of production), such that P = k + p, where p is profit.257

Marx's discussion of rent is carried out at the level of prices (rather than values), and in this regard, while the price of a non-rent-bearing commodity may be expressed: P = k + p, the price of the rent-bearing commodity is expressed:

P = k + p + r, where r is rent, which, due to its differential character, will vary from capital to capital depending on the quality and capitalization of the factor upon which the rent is derived.258 The variable magnitude of r thus means that certain capitals, those enjoying the most optimal mixture of natural fertility and capital intesivity, will achieve an above average rate of profit out of which a relatively larger rent will be paid.

It should be noted that the presence of either or both forms of Differential

181 Rent necessitate the presence of Absolute Rent,259 which speaks to the matter of why no land, specifically that of the worst quality, is free, and therefore, all land is rent bearing. Here the notion of Absolute Rent simply recognizes that though an agricultural capital might find itself operating on the worst quality land currently engaged in production,260 this simply means that the market price it realizes for its output covers its own prices of production (the components of k) as well as an additional payment to landed capital constituting the (Aboslute) minimum rent possible, whereas the market prices realized by capitals operating on better quality lands contain a surplus profit accruing from the increased productivity of the land they opperate on, which should correspond with a proportionately larger (Differential) rent. For Marx, rent is always determined with respect to the worst quality land, and while for theoretical purposes it might be expedient to conceptualize this worst category of land as non-rent bearing, in reality no land is free, and therefore there is always an absolute minimum rent borne in the price of goods utilizing monopolizable resources in their production.

With respect to matters of FOSS and commercial software, intellectual prop­ erty rights grant information a quality not dissimilar to land in Marx's discussion

(i.e. being completely monopolizable), upon which a rent like structure might be erected.261 It is precisely this sort of structure which is criticized by FOSS

182 advocates as giving rise to the conditions which have established a limited form of monopoly in the software producing industries. It is critical to note, however, that Marx is clear on the fact that rent is not identical to monopoly pricing, though it is analogous to the extent that rent generates a very specific form of monopoly price linked to prevailing capitalist social relations, whereas monopoly pricing is more generally a product of capital competition.262

Of course, the obvious divergence we encounter when considering intellectual property rights and software analogously with Marx's theory of rent, is that while the latter is actually tied to a parcel of material property which, at least in its essence - including its natural fertility - preexisted the prevailing social property relations, the former remains essentially immaterial and may only be treated oth­ erwise due to these same historically bound social property relations. It is as if intellectual property rights conjure property out of thin air. Moreover, the fer­ tility of intellectual property is variable - linked to a network effect, whereby the utility of a given parcel of information is determined by its position within the broader body of social knowledge. From this perspective, intellectual property rights provide the ontological foundation for rent, while the network externality determines its magnitude. Further, the enclosure that intellectual property rights enable with respect to software is exacerbated by the escalating capitalization of

183 these property rights by the established capitals in the market. As Marx points out, the magnitude of the surplus profit (determining rent) that a capital gener­ ates by operating on a given parcel of land is determined both by the quality (i.e. fertility) and quantity of the land itself (the basis for Differential Rent I), as well as by the intensity of the capital investment in the land (the basis for Differential

Rent II).263 These factors determine the extent to which software protected by intellectual property rights are able to command the market prices that they do.

From a neoclassical perspective this premise is theoretically derivable from the nonrivalry argument which asserts that information commodities should be theo­ retically costless, while in reality we know that this is not the case. From a value theory perspective we can similarly deduce that, given Marx's principle of moral depreciation, copies devalue their original on the basis that the reproduction of software is a potentially costless process (or is at least devoid of meaningful con­ tributions from living labour) beyond the sunken costs of initial production, and therefore there is no basis from which additional value could be transfered to the copy, despite the fact that much software is commodified.264

Critically, because Marx is dealing literally with ground rent, and agricultural production (predominantly), when determining what exactly the nature of rent is in terms of value, Marx is able to trace its origin back to agricultural labour, and

184 as such, rent is composed entirely of surplus value which is transfered to the land owner out of the surplus profit accruing to the farmer/capitalist.265 Thus, there are two components to the rent phenomenon, first, the production of surplus value, and second, the transfer, or redistribution, of surplus value. Neither of these components of rent is entirely obvious when we are considering software and intellectual property rights. With respect to the latter component of rent, the transfer of surplus value, Marx's analysis of rent pits the interests of the class of landed property against those of farmers and capitalists, though it is important to note that these roles need not be mutually exclusive - the capitalist may also be the landowner.266 Where the roles of capitalist and landowner intersect, the rent simply accrues to the capitalist, as she has made the requisite initial investment in the purchase of the land enabling her monoploization of it. The outstanding matter here though is where this surplus value is created if software, unlike agricultural products, is subject to a persistent devaluation accruing from its immaterial - effortlessly duplicated - nature.

As presented here, the price of software reflects the price of production for the labour that produces it, as well as that of the constant capital (including other software) used up in its production. The enduring contribution of these factors of production can only be guaranteed by the presence of intellectual property

185 rights, which constitute a rent within the price reflected in the cost of software beyond its marginal cost of production of nil. Further, the potential presence of a network externality interacts with the magnitude of the rent to the extent that it reflects extant social demand, and in fact arguably establishes a tendency towards monopsony. These dual tendencies towards monopoly and monopsony are then the basis for enduring prices in the software market. Additionally, and not yet considered here, to the extent that commercial software is routinely sold with some minimum guarantee of support and/or service, this is also reflected in the price of the software. Similarly, with respect to the underlying value of software, value is created by the labour that produces software, and is con­ tributed by the constant capital (again including other software) used up in its production. Likewise, this net-positive value product can only persist so long as intellectual property rights are in place thereby placing individual software offer­ ings (of a comparable type) in a competitive relationship with each other which implies an ongoing process of moral depreciation, and further must account for the specificities of the individual licenses themselves. It might be tempting to dismiss intellectual property rights as a basis for valorization on the grounds that they are a historically contextual phenomenon. However, this is precisely why intellectual property rights must be considered, as value reflects prevailing social

186 property relations which are by definition historically constituted.

Just as in the case of price, the potential presence of a network externality may also contribute to the value of software, though it is not immediately obvious how this is in fact that case, as the network externality accrues from simple pos­ session and use by consumers, and it is taken as fundamental from a value theory perspective that exchange is not valorizing. In fact, the presence of a network externality does not imply valorization via exchange, but rather suggests that the value of the labour performed in the production of the commodity is evaluated with respect to this changing social criteria in the moment of exchange. In this respect the network externality serves as a justification (though potentially spec­ ulative with respect to what a capital expects to achieve in terms of the adoption of its software) for monopoly pricing to the extent that it reflects and/or antic­ ipates a certain level of social demand. The network externality thus speaks to a historically dynamic quality in use values, and this translates into a basis for valorization to the extent that what the labour that produces the commodity in question accomplishes in the production of the commodity changes qualita­ tively with respect to the development of the commodity's social character. The network externality then augments extant value.

Finally, and again, as in the case of price, if the commodity is linked to

187 labour that facilitates its ongoing development, maintenance, and/or facilitates the provision of support or other services, this labour also counts as valorizing.

Critically, though individual consumers may interpret the price of a given piece of software as containing a claim on future labour in the form of service and/or support, this component of price is in fact a payment to current labour engaged in the production the software, including that engaged in service and support pro­ vision.267 Accordingly, it is this immediate, but hidden, labour that is valorizing, and again, this is only apparent if we understand commodity production from a social perspective in which the apparent payment to future labour contained within an individual exchange is in fact a payment to current labour engaged by the same capital but in the production of a commodity other than that from which the reflux of capital is immediately achieved.

The moment of exchange is the context in which, regardless of the specific character of its production, the object of exchange is evaluated as a commodity.

This seemingly miraculous transformation which occurs in the exchange context is the basis for erroneously assuming that exchange creates value. Rather, it is always the labour of production which creates value, and the specific character of this labour which facilitates deviations in the magnitude of surplus value and profit accruing to individual capitals. In their manifestation as a realized money

188 price, these deviations in particular appear as extra value ... or value added - a fact which explains the potential appeal of FOSS to capital, as the FOSS labour process constitutes a potentially profitable transformation in the structure of production where software commodities are concerned.

In eschewing intellectual property rights as a basis for generating profit, cap­ itals in the software production industry that adopt FOSS as a capitalization platform are not reasonably able to use the labour directly engaged in the pro­ duction of the software they aim to commoditize as a foundation for valorization.

For this reason, support, services, and proprietary extensions become the primary revenue channels. However, the value augmentation accruing from a network ex­ ternality still obtains where it takes hold, and the commodified labour committed by capital to the development of FOSS sees its value product recouped via these channels. Just as the price of commercial software often includes within it a price for services not yet rendered, the price of FOSS services may contain within them a price for ongoing software production. Further, given the heterogeneous character of labour engaged in many FOSS projects, directly commodified labour benefits from the participation of its non-commodified (i.e. freely donated) coun­ terpart. In this case, the FOSS labour process acts as labour power optimizer, realizing a productivity of labour which disproportionately exceeds the produc-

189 tion price of labour borne by a particular capital. In this regard, while we might be tempted to disaggregate a commercial service bearing a price from the freely distributed FOSS it is associated with, and in doing so, suggest that the FOSS in question is not commodified due to its lacking a discrete price, in fact, the FOSS here functions as a means of production, the function of which is to produce de­ mand for additional commercial services etc. Any commodified labour dedicated to the production and maintenance of the FOSS in question then, is valorizing, and has its value product realized in the price of the services which the FOSS generates a market for.

As the network externality assumes, and as captured in Marx's notion of the general intellect, a considerable amount of the use value of information, and in this case software, resides in its social character, and not simply in its own explicit functional qualities! In light of this, notions of value added business strategies, and synergy, can be made sense of in terms of capital's appropriation of socially produced value. This appropriation becomes skewed towards specific capitals where intellectual property rights enable the emergence of a rent-like phenomenon. The intervention of FOSS in the software industries then threatens to undermine this rent facilitating structure, but for the purpose of establishing a new terrain for capital competition. Inasmuch as Marx noted the antagonism

190 between landowners and capital, this antagonism persists, but now increasingly between that group of intellectually propertied capitals, and the capitals which would be subject to the rents imposed on them by this former group.

3.3.5 FOSS as (Post)Industrial Capital

Inasmuch as FOSS might serve as the basis for establishing a new (common) terrain for capital competition, part of the boon to capital that FOSS seems to promise appears in its potential to stand in as a substitute for commercial alternatives that are utilized in the production process as means of production.

Moreover, the growing importance of IT, and software in particular across all industries means that such an intervention could in fact generate a far ranging economic impact extending well beyond the boundaries of IT related industries.

Given: Marx's circuit of capital describes the cyclical process whereby commodities are purchased, produced, and sold by any given capital, and is expressed as: M — C...P... C' — M', where M denotes money, C denotes capital inputs, P denotes the production process delimited by an ellipsis which signifies an interruption in the circuit, and the prime (f) indicates a changed (enlarged) magnitude such that, in value terms, C < C, and in money terms, M < M'.268

Within Marx's circuit of capital, what matters most for this discussion is the

191 second stage, in which the commodities enter the production process (C... P).

Notably, the capital inputs (C) are decomposed into two categories: means of pro­ duction (mp), and labour power (L), such that stage two of the circuit is properly conceptualized as M — C™p ... P. Where FOSS may be used in the production process, in place of a commercial alternative, we can expect the magnitude of mp to decrease, thereby lowering the value of C, and ultimately C, given that

C = mp + L + s. Thus a decrease in the magnitude of mp, which would corre­ spond to the value displaced by the adoption of FOSS in place of a commercial offering, should translate into the production of a commodity embodying less value.

Turning to the third stage of the circuit now, in which produced commodities are realized in the money form (C' — M'), the nature of C is of critical importance.

Specifically, if the individual capital in question is producing means of production, then a reduction in the size of C will be transmitted to other capitals, as it will be consumed as an input (mp) to their own production processes.269 However, if the individual capital in question is producing means of consumption (i.e. consumer goods), then there is a potential decrease in the cost of reproduction for variable capital (v), and therefore labour power (L).

ex.i: Consider a capital using a commercial piece of software on its computers, which it then replaces with a FOSS alternative (barring

192 consideration of service or support contracts), thereby displacing some value embodied in means of production, represented by n. Across the two periods of production then, we see:

P v n M-C^ ...P1...C'-M'- C'™ ~ ...P2...C"-M"

Given that C — c + v + s, then:

sx = C - C, and s2 = C" - C

Critically, the illustration above points to an ambiguity in how exactly FOSS might factor into the labour process, and that is, while we can derive a surplus value from both phases of production, whether or not s\ is smaller, equivalent, or

larger than s2 is unspecified, and contingent upon the magnitude of n. If the rate of surplus (-), the organic composition of capital (-), and the quantity of both

c and v remain constant, then s2 < Si- However, if any of the afore mentioned

conditions of production change, then the relative magnitude of s2 to s1 is non- determinate. Nonetheless, what matters in this case is not so much the absolute value produced, as the rate of profit (p'), since it is the rate of profit that indicates the magnitude of the surplus relative to production costs that will be available

270 for reinvestment. In the example above, so long as p'2 > p[ then the relative magnitude of surplus is climbing, despite the fact that less value is being created

193 overall. Given that p' = ^, we know that c and p' are inversely correlated barring a change in the magnitude of s and v. This last condition is important.

The magnitude of s is intrinsically linked to the magnitude of v by the rate of surplus, such that s = s'v.271 Implicit in this relationship are claims regarding the length of the working day, the productivity of labour (i.e. the ratio of the magnitude of the value product, v+s, to the magnitude of the mass of use values it is embodied in), and the utilization rate of labour. Setting other considerations aside for a moment, the utilization rate of labour is extremely relevant to the matter at hand, as labour and capital must be employed in the proper proportion such that there is enough labour power to set the desired magnitude of capital in motion without a surplus or deficit of either. What is crucial to note where we consider FOSS as an intervening element in the production process is that while it displaces value, it does so without displacing productive capacity, as it stands in as a substitute use value for the commercial software displaced. Thus FOSS allows for the magnitude of value in c to be reduced without a corresponding reduction in its technical quantity, and therefore without a reduction in either the value, or technical quantity of v, thereby raising the rate of profit barring changes in s.

Given: The Organic Composition of Capital (OCC) describes the ratio in which variable capital stand to constant capital: OCC = -.

194 Further: Within the OCC, the magnitudes of both v and c may be expressed in value terms, as the Value Composition of Capital (VCC), or in technical quantities, as the Technical Composition of Capital (TCC). The directions and rates of change of the VCC and TCC are variable within the OCC272

The fact that replacing commercial software with FOSS has a variable impact on the value and technical expressions of the OCC generates a number of useful effect for both individual capitals as well as for capital as a whole. For individual capitals, in displacing a proprietary product with FOSS, money (of the magnitude pn, representing the price transformed n from the example above) is precipitated out of the circuit. This money can then be used in a number of ways: 1.) It can be added to a hoard to serves.as latent money capital in credit markets, or as a reserve fund used to smooth out anomalous aspects of the production and circulation processes (i.e. turnover);273 2.) It can be appropriated directly, in full or in part by the capitalist into their own personal consumption fund; and

3.) It can be reapplied to the production process. In other words, it provides the basis for both securing current business operations, as well as for expanding the productive apparatus. Perhaps more importantly, however, from a general economic standpoint, the inverse movement that FOSS might allow between the

VCC and TCC constitutes a countertendency to the LTRPF to the extent that

195 in technical terms the OCC is growing (thereby tending towards a drop in the profit rate), while in value terms the OCC remains fixed, or even declines (thereby tending towards a stable or climbing profit rate). This countertendency to the

LTRPF is a benefit to capital as a whole, though it is not apprehended as such by individual capitals. Rather, the differential between VCC and TCC is seized upon by individual capitals in the differential between the requisite capital outlay

(cost price) for a given production period, and the prevailing market price for the commodities produced.

Critically, the parameters of the transformation function, whereby values are transformed into prices, are set by capitals exhibiting the modal OCC for a given industry.274 As such, capitals exhibiting an above-modal OCC will appropriate value from those exhibiting a below-modal OCC,275 thereby establishing an av­ erage rate of profit across the industry. This pattern of appropriation persists until the modality of the OCC for the industry shifts to a new, higher, level - the inevitable outcome of competition between capitals. In this period of time where the differential in the modality of the OCC persists, capitals exhibiting a higher modality will enjoy a higher than average rate of profit.276 Notably, and returning to the analysis set out earlier, while the dynamics of competition the­ oretically ensure that a higher than average rate of profit is transient in nature,

196 in reality, phenomena such as intellectual property rights, technological lock-in, and more generally, excessive costs accruing to technological change, intervene, entrenching the bases for rent taking. Moreover, this intervention may occur at both the level of the individual capital, as well as of that of the sector.

Tony Smith has argued that a rent generating tendency is in fact endemic to certain instances of technological change within the production processes of specific sectors. These technological rents accrue by virtue of the fact that the productive application of technology entails, in whole or at least in part, the sec­ torally specific systematization of the technology in question.277 Smith points out that within specific sectors of the economy the productive application and devel­ opment of technology (i.e. technology's application in the service of increasing the productivity of labour) may take on a specific trajectory which limits its use­ fulness to the productive activities confined within that sector. In other words, not all technological change generates a positive spillover effect, and moreover, these instances of technological change may sectorally entrench rent generating discrepancies in the OCC (specifically its value expression - the VCC) socially considered. As such "the technological frontier does not expand at the same rate in all industries at all times. ... This implies that different industries have different

"warranted rates of growth" due to their material differences."278

197 Considered along side the analysis of intellectual property rights and soft­ ware presented to this point, Smith's examination of technological change, from which he derives a tendency towards enduring sectorally specific technological rents, suggests that the presumption that dynamics of competition ensure that higher than average rates of profit are transient in nature, is essentially flawed.

Rather, certain sectors, and specifically those most thoroughly concerned with the economically dominant forms of technology, may achieve persistent above average rates of profit via enduring technological rents. These sectorally specific technological rents are further compounded by rents taken by individual capitals accruing from intellectual property rights, technological lock-in, and excessive costs associated with technological change. As such, rents potentially manifest at both the level of the individual capital, as well as of that of the sector. Given this scenario, rational competitive activity must assume the form of undermining the basis for rent taking at both of these levels.

3.4 The Labour of FOSS

In his analysis of rent, Marx at one point remarks that "... capital cannot create a waterfall from its own resources."279 The meaning behind this remark is simply that capital is unable to create those natural phenomena upon which Differential

198 Rent I is based. What we see with the growing prevalence of intellectual property rights, however, is indeed capital's manufacture of waterfalls via the appropria­ tion of social knowledge. As set out above, what FOSS potentially enables is the costless (or at least less costly) manufacture of waterfalls, thereby equalizing the differential in fertility between the competing productive apparatuses of capital and therefore removing the basis for Differential Rent I. By extension, to the extent that FOSS may also enable the overcoming of significant technical barri­ ers to entry, and reduce the cost price of production, it also provides the means for undoing Differential Rent II, inasmuch as Differential Rent II derives from the intensity of capital investment. Where these effects obtain, FOSS holds the potential to open up spaces for economic activity focused on software services, and additionally, to reduce the cost price of production for capitals counting software among their fixed assets expenditures. Of course, these benefits accrue only at the expense of capitals whose profits are predicated on strong intellectual property rights protecting their software, though, as stated earlier, according to neoclassical assumptions this would be considered a market rational phenomenon so long as there is a net positive shift in the production of utilities. From a value theory standpoint, what matters is the production of value, and again, to the extent that FOSS can be considered commodified, and additionally, holds the

199 potential to slow or even reduce the growth of a capital's VCC while promoting a lesser, or even opposite, movement in the TCC, FOSS establishes a new ba­ sis for value production, and as such constitutes a potential countertendency to crisis within capitalism. The outstanding issue here, however, is that inasmuch as FOSS might appear to be the great equalizer in software production so far as competitive markets are concerned, business models keen on utilizing FOSS must nonetheless be predicated on capital's appropriation of value created by labour - the content of the waterfall.

As Benkler points out, information production, and software production in particular, is a productive activity that hinges on creative labour, which is a con­ cept that lacks definitional crispness. Human creativity is not easily quantified or defined, and as such, it cannot be easily priced. Thus, a transactional model based on informal, mutable, or otherwise fuzzy, conceptualizations of social rela­ tions, such as a network, rather than on rigid structures, as in a firm, makes more sense when we are dealing with things lacking crispness.280 Based on the dual as­ sumptions that the network form is a more efficient communicative model than its hierarchical counterparts where the management of creativity is concerned, and that the volunteerist or semi-volunteerist nature of FOSS projects inheres to a network form to some degree, the FOSS model is assumed to represent a

200 more optimal model for the dissemination of privately held knowledge, thereby increasing the information gathering capacity of the process overall, and reducing uncertainty regarding the needs of the production process as a whole for the par­ ticipants involved.281 This actually draws the transaction cost discourse closer to its neoclassical foundations to the extent that the efficiency of the FOSS model is predicated on a move away from firm type - command based - organization towards an ad hoc networked form in which participant preferences are worked out on a distributed one-to-one basis - as in the idealized market.282 In this case, creativity turns out to be the rational limit of the firm.

3.4.1 Resistant Creativity in 'Late' Capitalism

In its idealized from, the FOSS labour process adheres closely to Benkler's notion of commons based peer production which describes "production systems that de­ pend on individual action that is self-selected and decentralized," and for which the "primary attribute is the separation of the locus of opportunities for action from the auhtority to choose the action that the agent will undertake."283 In some regard, and as outlined in the brief history of FOSS presented at the outset of this section, the emergence of the FOSS peer production model of development can be traced back to the historical coincidence of technological capacity (specifically

201 the onset of IT) with technological necessity (specifically the relative scarcity of resources available to enthusiasts early on). Additionally, this phenomenon may be conceptualized as a reaction, on the part of computer programmers, to the attempts made throughout the 1960s and 70s to rationalize this relatively new form of labour, routinizing it, and bringing it ever more under the control of non­ technical management.284 Specifically, this process of rationalization found itself at odds with the originally collegial nature of the activity which had originated in academic and scientific centres outside of capital's sphere of influence, and therefore largely apart from strict notions of managerial control.285

Undoubtedly, the reason that this new model of production has garnered so much interest is that it appears as a challenge to the prevailing understandings of the capitalist labour process. Most obviously, the apparent lack of a formal, and discretely defined, management structure challenges the long established as­ sumptions regarding managerial prerogative, and more fundamentally, the need for management entirely. Shoshan Zuboff has correlated this challenge to man­ agement with the onset of IT in general, noting that IT related work routinely demands abstraction and analytical activities which correspond with skills and information that are not easily appropriated by managers not directly engaged in the production process themselves. Thus, the traditional notion that manage-

202 ment serves as the specialized repository of knowledge within the labor process

(i.e. the organ of conception relative to the worker's organ of execution) increas­ ingly comes into crisis as IT becomes increasingly central.286 Critically, Zuboff is also quite aware of how IT can be (and has been) used to further routinize work.

With respect to this latter aspect of Zuboff's work, her thinking parallels that of

Braverman, though it differs considerably to the extent that ultimately, Zuboff sees the introduction of IT into the labour process as a process of simultaneous deskilling and upskilling.287

Indeed, Braverman linked the process of scientific-technical development closely to the development of the capitalist labour process under the rubric of Tay- lorism,288 and in doing so, ignored how it might be that the process of scientific- technical development might actually become antagonistic to the logic of scientific management. It is notable though, that Braverman does explicitly acknowledge that the development of capitalism entails the emergence of not only new spheres of production, but also, new spheres of nonproduction, which in turn generate new occupational distributions. Further, and in line with the analysis presented in the preceding section of this work, Braverman suggested that the function of these nonproductive entities is to reinforce the social basis for further capital ac­ cumulation (ie. research and development, and basic market expansion - therefore

203 the growing of social needs), as well as providing a structural redress to the crisis tendency (ie. sopping up labour).289 In this regard, while Braverman's deskilling thesis fits poorly with the phenomenon of FOSS peer production, his broader application of Marxist political economy also intimates the continual onset of a sphere of nonproductive activity to which his primary analysis might not be ap­ plicable. This possibility, however, does not rescue Braverman's theory from the the observation that the onset of the Japanese model of lean production inverted the Taylorist notion of factory as site of knowledge extraction, to that of factory as site of knowledge creation.290 In this regard, if we trace the development of the labour process from Taylorism to Toyotism to Peer Production (which are never totalized across an entire economy), though we see a distinct movement away from ruthless deskilling (contra Braverman), we see a sort of cyclical continuity with respect to the nature of skill/knowledge distribution within the labour pro­ cess. The cyclical nature of this continuity, is made apparent if we take Marx's discussion of the evolution of the labour process into account, to the extent that peer production seems to share common features with both the organizational from he termed cooperation, the stage of development in the labour process which precedes large scale manufacture (or machinofacture), and therefore is indicative of a not yet fully developed form of capitalism,291 and, as noted earlier, that

204 phase of capitalist development cropping up after the onset of real subsumption

- the general intellect. In this regard, and in line with Marx's thinking on cap­ italism in general, the development of the capitalist labour process, at least at its leading edge where technology is concerned, is not strictly linear, but rather, cyclical.292 This cyclical character derives from the linkage between knowledge, skill, and technology, to the extent that the development of skill and technol­ ogy is increasingly dependent on the development of the social knowledge base, while the logic of capitalist production seeks to establish an inverse correlation between skill and technological attainment (i.e. deskilling). Thus, the conditions for growing the social knowledge base, and therefore expanding the horizon of technological attainment, are ultimately at odds with the conditions for maintain­ ing a labour process premised on deskilling at the level of individual capitals.293

As Carchedi points out, deskilling via technological innovation entails the cre­ ation of new skilled fields of work, and these constitute a countertendency to deskilling becoming a generalized feature of the capitalist labour process.294

Critically, inasmuch as the onset of the information economy, and the growing centrality of highly skilled forms of creative work, represent a countertendency to the deskilling tendency, this also necessarily entails a countertendency to a de­ clining cost of variable capital. We know this due to the fact that skilled labour

205 simply counts as some multiple of simple socially necessary labour (i.e. deskilled labour), thereby commanding a greater value for the labour power rendered.295

Furthermore, while encouraging growth in the available labour pool of computer programmers will undoubtedly have a negative impact on wages, the extent of this impact is tempered to some degree by the fact that experienced programmers re­ main a relatively scarce commodity.296 This relative scarcity accrues in part from the fact that the skill of programming is cumulative in nature and situated within a fast moving context of technological innovation - leading to a continual, and fairly rapid, expansion of the content which defines the work. Inasmuch as man­ agement is premised on the appropriation of skill by the manager, this particular configuration makes such appropriation effectively impossible, and in this regard, deskilling (the shifting of labour towards its abstract socially necessary form in

Marx's terms) is not effectively possible. Additionally, and for the same reasons presented above, maintaining an up to date skill set is an intensive (therefore costly) endeavour, thereby inclining the labour market for programmers towards an enduring scarcity at its upper tiers. For both reasons set out here, wages have tended to remain high for this occupational category.

In the previous section it was determined that intellectual property rights might institute monopoly like structures in the software producing industries, and

206 further, that these structures might be reinforced by escalating capital outlays.

Theoretically, these monopoly-like structures would provide the basis on which an above average rate of profit might be extracted by protected capitals, however, to the extent that computer programmers command a wage well above that accruing to socially necessary abstract labour, inasmuch as monopoly like structures in the commercial software production industry might act as a source of rent, the magnitude of this rent should be significantly hampered by above average labour costs. Critically, Marx's analysis of Absolute Rent tells us that above average rate of profit or not, and considerations of differential fertilities aside, some amount of rent always accrues to those who are able to monopolize a needed resource,297 and as such, opposition to the holders of intellectual property rights proceeds simply on the basis that rent must be paid regardless of the profit rate. What matters here though, is the extent to which FOSS presents a means for lessening the capital outlay associated with its variable form - labour.

High labour costs may also be counted among the barriers to market entry which contribute to the software producing industries' monopoly like character.

On this basis, protected firms can afford higher variable capital costs due to either one, or a combination, of above average profits and rent extracted from intellectual property rights. This provides further impetus to firms interested in

207 entering the IT market space to turn towards support and service business models rather than software production business models. This is mind, while most of the discretely defined occupations within the Computer and Mathematical Science

Occupations category exhibit extremely high wages (mean $35.82/hr. circa May,

2008), one, Computer Support Specialists, exhibits a considerably lower wage

(about $22/hr. circa May, 2008) than its counterparts.298 This is notable, if only for the reason that inasmuch as many FOSS business strategies emphasize a shift to service and support provision, this considerably cheaper category of labour would potentially displace its more expensive occupational counterparts via FOSS. The relative cheapness of Computer Support Specialists relative to their counterparts within the Computer and Mathematical Science Occupations category can be explained by the extent to which it is possible to reduce this type of labour to an essentially scripted (read: deskilled) activity.299

Such a shift in the labour market would also inflict substantial discipline on the available pool of labour oriented towards software production in general.

Specifically, by reducing the demand for programmer type occupations, wage discipline could be imposed on these occupational categories. In some regard,

Lerner and Tirole have theorized this scenario as already extant in their claim that participation in FOSS projects can be explained in part as a signaling tech-

208 nique pursued by job seekers keen to demonstrate their acuity in programming in an increasingly competitive labour market.300 Additionally, and with respect to the cumulative nature of the skill of computer programming, participation in

FOSS projects might also be explained in terms of providing an avenue by which programmers may further build and refine their skills.301 In this respect, FOSS might also serve an educational function, though its engagement is left to the impetus of the individual - as opposed to being provided, say, in the form of firm or state subsidized training - thereby further reducing labour costs to capital.302

These possibilities dovetail with the discussion of labour discipline to the extent that, separating ones' self from the pack in terms of capability, becomes increas­ ingly important as the supply-demand mechanism in the labour market shifts in the favour of capital. The more pressing matter here though, is that the possible signaling, and educating functions of FOSS point toward the possible onset of a bifurcation in the labour market for software production, throughout which the technical activity of programming is increasingly separated from the more abstract, and skill demanding, activities associated with software architecture, design, and engineering. Indeed, this possibility is reflected in the BLS' projec­ tion of an above average employment growth for computer software engineers of

32% over the next ten years, accompanied by a decline of 3% in employment for

209 computer programmers over this same time period. This movement is explained as obtaining from "[ajdvances in programming languages and tools, the grow­ ing ability of users to write and implement their own programs, and the offshore outsourcing of programming jobs ... ."303 (Emphasis added.)

What we see here then is the increasing formalization of a three-tiered labour market connected to employment in the software industry: the bottom tier com­ prised of service and support specialists, the middle tier comprised of computer programmers, and the top tier comprised of software engineers. Within this structure, occupational skill requirements and wages increase as you move from the bottom to the top, as does the resistance of the skill set to the deskilling efforts of management. FOSS based business strategies might potentially inter­ vene in this structure by reducing the size of the middle (programming) tier by providing access to external community development, while growing the size of the (lower waged) bottom (service and support) tier. What becomes of the top tier of software engineers will depend on how the specific capital attaches itself to the FOSS community, and specifically on the amount of original software de­ velopment that the capital chooses to keep internal. This sort of whithering of the middle accentuates the already present core-periphery relationship among IT labourers that exists within the organizational structure of the IT departments

210 of firms, and for this reason, it is notable that the organizational structure of many large FOSS projects exhibit a similar core-periphery structure in which a relatively small number of core members constitute a technical decision mak­ ing centre, while outward movement along the axes of the organization finds a growing numbers of members dedicated to increasingly more explicitly defined, technical tasks.304

The major difference that can be drawn between the core-periphery structure of the formal labour market for the software industry, and that of the FOSS con­ tributor base is that while both ostensibly determine the location of any given worker/contributor based on her merit, this sort of meritocracy is given a sort of law-like character in FOSS communities, while in the formal labour market it ex­ ists simply as a secondary implication of the prevailing economic rationality. As it turns out, the content of merit as it is understood within the FOSS community is actually a complex interaction of a number of variables, of which the most critical might be considered: technical ability, dedication to a project, general affability with the community, commitment to FOSS principles, and historical record of performance.305 What is critical to note here, with respect to this understanding of merit, is that inasmuch as FOSS development proceeds as a voluntary, coop­ erative affair, the concept of merit also establishes an economy of status within

211 FOSS contributor communities. In recognition (and explanation) of this fact, Eric

Raymond has suggested that continued contributor effort is largely driven by ego gratification.306 On its own, this explanation is likely too reductive (indeed much of the literature examining the motivations driving FOSS contribution tend to focus on ideological buy-in as a key motivator along side more instrumental, ego­ istic impulses), though it captures an important aspect of the FOSS community to the extent that inasmuch as an economy of merit encourages the realization of excellence within the process of technological innovation, it also habituates con­ tributors to the notion that their skill set stands in a competitive relation to other similar skill sets, and further, that success and failure in this skills competition is completely a matter of their own will to achieve. This sort of competitive- atomism among prospective labourers has always been a boon to capital, though to assume a conspiratorial role for capital in this phenomenon would be a gross misreading of the history of FOSS. Rather, this acclimating function which we might apprehend in FOSS communities is simply a useful byproduct, from the perspective of capital, of the numerous socio-economic forces which compel the ongoing development of FOSS.

With respect to the merit economy then, the core-periphery structure of large

FOSS communities encourages qualitative improvement in the overall productive

212 activity by placing the most skilled and dedicated people in the most influential positions. However, it is also crucial to note that the much larger peripheral community plays just as important, and perhaps an even more important, role in sustaining a relatively high level of productivity. This feature of FOSS de­ velopment is captured in what Raymond has termed Linus' Law (coined after the original architect of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds), meaning simply that qualitative excellence in labour may be achieved through a diversified mass of otherwise middling talents, or to put it in Raymond's words: "Given enough eye­ balls, all bugs are shallow. "307 It is in fact, this feature of commons based peer production which Yochai Benkler singles out as perhaps its most crucial power,308 and it is worth noting that inasmuch as this form of labour process is perhaps as far removed as possible from the notions of Taylorism that we might hold, this aspect of FOSS production in fact exemplifies the overarching principles of the complex division of labour - but in this case, applied to principally intellectual and creative forms of labour that have traditionally resisted such division.

Among the guiding principles of FOSS development methodology, the one which draws attention in this discussion is the overarching desire to reduce to an absolute minimum the duplication of effort.309 To a large degree this goal is facilitated by the interplay of the open license (which allows for the unrestricted

213 examination and reuse of code), with the technical features of the labour pro­ cess and its related technologies, and specifically the ways in which both foster granularity and modularity within the code itself.310 While the openness of the code allows many eyeballs to access it, the granularity and modularity of the code ensures that no one contributor need deal with the entire code base (which would be daunting for most large projects). In light of this, it is worth considering

Doug Mcllroy's summary of the Unix Philosophy, which is routinely cited with respect to FOSS development methodology: "Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface. "311 The essential character of this statement is undeniably Taylorist if we boil it down to: Tasks should be simplified to maximize efficient execution. Simplified tasks should be inter-relatable. Task inter-relation should be ensured by standardization.

In light of the high costs associated with labour engaged in software produc­ tion, the apparent core-periphery structure of many FOSS projects, and the po­ tential to realize Taylorist type performance outcomes despite the difficulties that creative labour presents to management under the rubric of Taylorism proper,

FOSS presents an attractive avenue to capital, not just for gaining a competi­ tive advantage or reducing the cost price of means of production, but also for

214 coping with an otherwise resistant supply of labour. This is a crucial point to grasp given the relative ease with which an apparent antagonism to capitalism can be read into the FOSS phenomenon. To the extent that the appearance of

FOSS corresponds to some extent with what Marx termed the General Intellect, inasmuch as the objective contradictions of capitalism might be laid bare in this period, the machinery of the prevailing technological rationality does not simply halt, or even slow.312 In this regard, it is useful to keep in mind Heidegger's rooting of technology in its original concept techne, which inheres to art and craft, and specifically to the creative process of production in each.313 In modern technology, this aspect of techne is subsumed in an enframing capacity, though it is not banished - it is an essential aspect of technology. As such, we would be in error if we concluded the obverse, that an apparent resurgence in creative production heralded the impending banishment of technological rationality.

Heidegger's gaze backwards to an era of artisinal production is instructive here, and fits well with the fact that the peer production model appears to ex­ hibit characteristics of the general cooperative labour process Marx identified as the precursor to large scale manufacture. Indeed, commons based peer produc­ tion seems to offer a means of overcoming the alienated labour of capitalism, and in doing so, restoring labour as creative life activity. In Eric Raymond's The

215 Cathedral and The Bazaar, widely recognized as the preeminent document link­ ing peer production to FOSS, Raymond extends this line of thinking to its most radical conclusion, that "[i]t may well turn out that one of the most important effects of open source's success will be to teach us that play is the most eco­ nomically efficient mode of creative work."314 The parallel here to post-scarcity reasoning, and in particular, Marcuse's hopeful speculations in the conclusion of One-Dimensional Man are unmistakable: the intersection of productive ef­ ficiency and scientific-technological sophistication creates the possibility for the redefinition of needs in line with their essential humanity.315

Despite the apparent thematic similarity here, however, Raymond's think­ ing differs significantly from that of Marcuse to the extent that Raymond bases his reasoning in an anti-dialectical Weberian framework. For Raymond, the hu- manization of the labour process, at least for creative workers linked to FOSS, reflects a perpetual process of institutional and technological improvement cum perfectibility. The logic of capital which bounds this process is not a factor up for consideration. Rather, the humanization of the labour process amounts to a technological recasting of the concrete features of labour in a manner which accommodates both the desire of the labouring subject, and the desire of capital, without entailing a change in the social relations which define both - technology

216 exists outside of history. With respect to the theoretical framework for technol­ ogy set out in the first section of this work, this is a problematic theorization.

Marcuse's work is far superior in this regard to the extent that any such recon­ ciliation under the terms of capitalism remains an objective impossibility, and the appearance of such a reconciliation without a commensurate change in the prevailing mode of production must be considered indicative of the machinations of the technological rationality busily churning out The Happy Consciousness. It is from this perspective that we can begin to understand what benefit to capital the FOSS phenomenon holds - the ability to effectively harness creative labour.

3.4.2 FOSS as Vector for Labour Exploitation

Inasmuch as FOSS might represent a new instrument for disguising the vicissi­ tudes of alienated labour, the fact of the matter remains that while many FOSS contributors might venture into a FOSS project for instrumental, signaling, pur­ poses, others (as the progenitors of FOSS most certainly did) approach it as a hobby, something done in their spare time, and drawn to the activity out of an enjoyment they take from it in itself. Indeed, Raymond frequently explains FOSS contributions in terms of satisfying the urge to scratch an itch - the motive to con­ tribute is deeply personal.316 What matters in this case though is that scratching

217 this itch, was, and often remains, an activity done outside of the context (both spatially, and temporally) of the formal capitalist labour bargain. While this can­ not be considered an entirely new phenomenon (ex. an auto worker might work on her car after work in her own garage), it is definitive of FOSS, and the ability to labour in this fashion is contingent upon the IT which enables, and shapes the entire FOSS apparatus. This may be specifically attributed to the way in which IT contributes to the creation of an excess capacity of labour power. In this case, excess capacity stems from the fact that the desired utility of a given technology (the computer in this case) is often fulfilled with only a portion of its resources used. This results in unused resources being free for other unintended applications. The delimiting factors here are time and space, such that an in­ dividual must have the time and be in the right place to contribute. However, these delimiting factors are also mitigated to some extent by the nature of IT, and specifically, by its modular and fine grained nature.317

The matter of excess capacity has in fact always been a concern for capital as

Marx demonstrates in his treatment of the potential differential between produc­ tion time and labour time.318 What makes IT such an exceptional case, however, is that while the means of production associated with industrial manufacturing were never common place items outside of the factory, those associated with in-

218 formation production (i.e. the computer) are - at least as functionally suitable approximations of their enterprise level counterparts. Thus, the commodification of IT, and specifically, its production as a commodity of mass consumption and not merely as means of production, serves as the technological basis for realizing this excess capacity. Just as important, however, are the detemporalizing and deterritorializing capacities of IT. Specifically, the claim that contributions to

FOSS may be made in spare time implies how the formal boundaries of the work place are disintegrating - establishing the social factory. In facilitating work away from the work place, and beyond the official hours of work, to the extent that

FOSS might be appropriated by capital, FOSS contribution in one's spare time would count as an extension of the working day, and therefore the basis for the creation of further surplus value. While the physiological barriers to such a possi­ bility must remain, in this case FOSS might represent a means for overcoming the social basis for resisting this sort of extension of the work day.319 The unresolved issue here of course is that these possibilities are effectively meaningless unless capital can find a way to harness this labour productively - a feat that FOSS licenses actively militate against to some degree.

Reflecting on the discussion earlier, the core-periphery type structure common to many FOSS projects is in fact a potentially critical feature of FOSS that may

219 provide a means for overcoming the problems associated with productively linking

FOSS to capital. As a general rule, firms interested in integrating themselves into the FOSS ecosystem (regardless of whether or not it is intended to act as a platform for the development of a strategic complimentary, as an enticement to an already existing commodity, or as a competitive instrument aimed at an other capital) have two choices facing them: start a new project, or align with an existing project. Comparatively, establishing a new project gives the firm considerable control over the nature of the production process, though it may also carry high up-front costs, and as such, joining an existing project may be more desirable if these costs threaten to exceed available funding. Furthermore, beyond the possibly large costs associated with this option, whether or not a critical mass of contributors can be attracted is an ambiguous issue. If no such community can be built/attracted, then the project either languishes or proceeds based primarily on the efforts of the initiating capital - in which case, this sort of strategy is actually less attractive than simply developing a piece of software commercially, as at least it might be sold. However, if a firm chooses to align itself with an existing

FOSS project, the firm's ability to influence the project's production decisions is diminished given the already established institutional form of the project.320 As such, the ability to leverage an extant FOSS project productively may be limited

220 (for instance by the project's choice in licensing, or by the long term technical goals of the project), and ultimately is contingent on an appropriate project even existing in the first place. Thus, strategies related to capital's integration into the

FQSS community reflect a trade-off between managerial control and cost price, and specifically the cost price of labour power.

The core-periphery structure of FOSS projects, however, suggests that this trade-off model understates a number of crucial dimensions of this matter of

FOSS-capital integration. Corresponding to the claimed existence of a core- periphery structure in FOSS projects, Raymond has frequently cited the relative pervasiveness of the 20-80 phenomenon, which refers to the tendency whereby, in many FOSS projects, the efforts of 20% of the contributors account for 80% of the total work done. This highly skewed distribution of effort corresponds to the extant core-periphery structure within FOSS labour processes, the most signifi­ cant consequence of which it that a relatively small group of active contributors essentially dictate the direction of development.321 The relative pervasiveness of this phenomenon can be understood in terms of a form of structural redress to the organizational complexities which accrue from scaling network structures, an observation that undermines many of the foundational arguments touting the superiority of the peer production model of organization.322 This scaling issue

221 can be conceptualized in two ways: First, as a growing cognitive overhead ob­ taining from to the need to maintain a suitably abstract architecture that will accommodate new and changed modules; and second, the problem of common coupling between modules where changes in one module can cascade into other modules that reference it or some data element within it.323 Indeed, the internal structures of the largest and most complex (therefore also the most successful)

FOSS projects have tended to drift away from peer production's ideal form as they grew. In some, such as the Linux kernel project, internal governance struc­ tures are established in a limited, somewhat ad hoc fashion, with particularly active contributors in a certain area being promoted to lieutenants managing that area, thereby reducing the load on Torvalds in terms of answering questions and applying submitted patches. Additionally, in other cases, such as the Apache

Software Foundation and The Mozilla Foundation, the internal structure takes an explicitly corporate form, establishing governing boards and officers. Aside from these more formalized governance structures, we can also identify a tier of contributor commonly referred to as committers. While anybody may ostensibly contribute to the development of FOSS, whether or not their contribution will actually be committed - added into - to the project will depend on the evaluation, and willingness of the relevant committer, and as such, this category of FOSS

222 contributor exercises a considerable control over the entire labour process.324

Though the FOSS labour process may be premised on voluntary contribu­ tion, as we can see, this does not mean that all contributors are considered equal in terms of their authority within the peer production network. In general, discussions around authority within FOSS communities focus heavily on merito­ cratic themes, linking the influence of any given contributor within the process as a whole to the quality and quantity of the work she provides.325 Critically, the quality and quantity of contribution is linked to specific ownership customs, which serve to reinforce this merit based authority structure. Specifically, the explicit attribution of work is a community norm that is well established within

FOSS circles.326 All new contributions or modifications must be signed by the contributor, thereby establishing an explicit textual, individualized history for every component of a project. This self-attribution establishes an exclusive on­ tological ownership over the particular work done (even if at some later date it is modified beyond recognition) by that contributor, despite the fact that in economic terms, ownership remains non-exclusive. Ownership within the FOSS labour process is thus ownership of a right to stake a claim to expertise, the merit of which is easily evaluated due to the interplay of the transparency of the code, and labour process as a whole, and the norm of attribution at work within both.

223 Additionally, this notion of ownership also establishes an ownership of responsi­ bility, to the extent that the named contributor is responsible (for at least some duration) for maintaining the integrity of her contributions with respect to the whole project, thus leading Eric Raymond to assert that within FOSS projects

"authority follows responsibility."327

What matters here, however, is that within the authority-responsibility rela­ tionship, responsibility must be considered a function of effort, as it in turn is explicitly linked to contribution. Thus, maximization of the ability to contribute is central to gaining authority within FOSS projects. In this case, maximization of the ability to contribute will be principally dependent on technical skill, and time. Here time must be considered a significant barrier to contribution to some extent, as excess capacity is intimately linked to the magnitude of spare time available to the would-be contributor, and this magnitude is determined by the time requirements of necessary life activities - most obviously by the length of the working day. And therein lies the rub. The contributors most able to dedicate their time to FOSS projects will be those that are either able to maximize their

FOSS contributions beyond the conclusion of their working day (either via fortu­ itous or unfortunate circumstance), or are able to contribute during their working day. Critically, (as discussed earlier) a survey of the largest and most successful

224 FOSS projects reveals that many of them incorporate some form of waged labour

- either funded through the project itself, or dedicated to the project by some outside capital or organization. As such, it is precisely through this authority- responsibility relationship that capitals looking to integrate themselves into the

FOSS ecosystem may find an avenue open to them. To the extent that capital can devote a portion of its waged labour to a FOSS project, or fund a FOSS project so that waged labour may be integrated into its labour process, capital may be able to gain access to the influential core of the project where critical decisions are made.

If a given interest (capital or otherwise) is able to effectively insert itself into the core of the decision making process, then it is potentially able to tap into the significant excess capacity residing in the much larger peripheral FOSS commu­ nity. However, it must be stressed again that it is important not to downplay the institutional momentum that many large FOSS projects posess, and in this regard, the ability to exert influence is significanlty tempered. As an illustra­ tion of the extent to which community or project norms may militate against intervening interests, it may be constructive to consider the resistance to forking exhibited in many FOSS projects.

Because FOSS licences demand the free distribution of an application's source

225 code, it is entirely possible for a contributor not satisified with the current direc­ tion of a project (or really, for any reason whatsoever) to fork the project such that she continues her own work on a new varriant of the code apart from the official project. As Weber points out, this phenomenon is in fact a potentially troubling characterisitic of the FOSS labour process as it amounts to a loss of synergy in the forked project.328 From the perspective of capital this volatility potentially undermines the principal benefit of FOSS production - the coordina­ tion of creative labour.329 Yet, this volatility seems to exist mostly as potential rather than as an actual common place phenomenon. As Raymond points out, actual forking is not common, though pseudo-forking (making a new - but still generally compatible flavour of a project) is.330 The threat to the community in this regard is limited to the extent that the fork of the project entails little chal­ lenge to the original in terms of compatibility (i.e. the network externality, and therefore synergy, of the project is largely left in tact due to the ability to rec­ oncile labour between the two projects). Moreover, if we accept Raymond's ego gratification thesis as a central explanatory axis in our understanding of FOSS contribution (as Weber does), inasmuch as forking might be driven by a desire to seek reputation (to establish your own code base), it also creates more possi­ bilities that undermine this outcome: First, the fork instigator may not be able

226 to establish herself as a credible leader in light of the existence of a larger more successful project, and as such, contributors may not be willing to defect to a smaller project when the rate and quality of development (which is in turn linked to reputation for contributors) is a function of project size. Second, the concept of forking casts a long shadow, to the extent that a forked code base can itself be forked, and in this regard the concept dissuades its own practice. Finally, repu­ tation accrues in part from usability - the minimum prerequisite for an audience of any size - which is in turn associated with a compatible code base. Forking works against compatibility and as such, undermines usability and therefore its value in reputational terms.331 Put bluntly, inasmuch as forking may hold the potential to put you in a starring role, it also potentially limits your audience.

What the resistance to forking illustrates is the extent to which FOSS projects, and the FOSS community at large, embody a strong set of norms which serve to maintain the cohesiveness of the collective body. Arguably, it is this cohesiveness which makes FOSS an attractive (though in many ways irreplicable) phenomenon to capital, inasmuch as cohesion can be explained by relatively high levels of af­ fective trust amongst community members, which is in turn correlated with an improved capacity for attracting new labour as well as retaining existing labour, and inspiring greater effort from contributors/labourers.332 As alluded to earlier,

227 capital's ability to effectively implement a normative control strategy must ul­ timately face the objective limit of profitability (as illustrated brilliantly by the collapse of the Dot Com bubble in the early 21s* century), and as such, FOSS communities are able to achieve what capital never can. The issue here then is that inasmuch as capital might have a point of access into the decision making apparatus of FOSS projects by way of provisioning paid labour, this possibility is curtailed by the norms of the community, and in fact, violating these norms

(i.e. attempting to shift project priorities in a manner not comensurate with entrenched values and practices) may carry with it substantial economic costs

(at the very least a monetary loss in the form of compensation to labour squan­ dered).333 However, though the extent to which any given capital might expect to be able to influence a FOSS project in an attempt to interleve the two labour processes productively is limited, this does not foreclose on any beneficial return, in terms of labour inputs and therefore value production, accruing to capital from the labour of FOSS.

In general, the principal benefits that capital might derive from FOSS in terms of labour and labour process stem from the capacity of FOSS projects to serves as models for institutional learning, and platforms for skills, or human cap­ ital, development.334 Realistically, firms are most likely not interested in exactly

228 mimicing the FOSS labour process, no matter how well it copes with the man­ agement of creative workers, and this is due in part to the fact that, as previously discussed, the FOSS labour process carries with it some potentially significant penalties where legal accountability is concerned, and further, inasmuch as the network form is theorized as an efficient transactional model, it might also suffer a penalty to its efficiency as it grows in size and complexity - a matter that is further complicated by the possible interaction of core periphery relations be­ tween contributors. More pressing, however, but in many ways related to the matter of network size and complexity, is the fact that the acceptable parame­ ters of production appear to vary between FOSS projects and firms. Specifically, while FOSS is routinely touted as a superior software development paradigm in terms of its speed and the quality of its output,335 limited research into the quality claim suggests that differences in quality between FOSS and commer­ cially produced software are in fact negligible, or perhaps even skewed to the benefit of commercially produced software.336 More to the point, however, how quality is operationalized in FOSS communitites and in firms may differ signif­ icantly. Specifically, the FOSS development methodology has frequently been guided (not without controversy) by the principle of Release Early, Release Of­ ten.337 This processural principle serves to ensure that code is exposed to as many

229 scrutinizing eyeballs as quickly as possible, and hopefully attracts even more, in an effort to facilitate quality improvements. However, meeting this rapid pace development principle may encourage a lowering of the functional requirements for the release of code. Code simply running may be enough to turn it over to the community.338 Consider this sort of breakneck experimentalism in the context of a slogan Apple once coined for an advertising campaing: It just works. There is a lot of distance between runs and works.339 When the modular nature of FOSS projects runs up against the fact that computer systems function as an amalgam of many fragmented layers of software and hardware, the sort of quality that

'It just works' implies becomes difficult to attain. Regardless of the quality of any given component, the quality of the computer ecosystem as a whole is what constitutes user experience, and as such defines quality.340 The fact that Linux has struggled for over a decade to become a reasonable alternative desktop OS

(it has certainly come a long way, and there are many that feel that it has now reached this point) is a painful reminder of how poorly FOSS has faired in this regard. Indeed, while FOSS as a model for the management for creative labour may excell in generating a frezy of creative output, it is not clear that it is always as successful in focusing that output in a way that would achieve the sort of quality in production that firms are concerned with. For this reason, it is notable

230 that the largest FOSS projects, have themselves often strayed from the pure peer production, or bazaar type model, and that companies seeking productivity pay offs from a FOSS like labour process have found it necessary to augment it with more traditionally top-down managerial structures.341

For these reasons, capital's participation in FOSS where labour process con­ siderations are concerned is probably best understood in terms of attempting to marshall FOSS as a platform for organizational learning.342 Rather than at­ tempting to mimic FOSS labour process principles wholesale, FOSS projects are valued for their capacity to expose participants to new technologies, programming practices, and organizational principles. Where labour is donated to the FOSS project by capital, or where a contributor is hired into the ranks of a particular capital, these innovations may then be captured through the experience of the pariticpant. West and Gallhager have attempted to add sophistication to this po­ tential strategy by outlining what they refer to as a model of Open Innovation.343

What West and Gallhager apprehend in the information economy is a latent pool of intellectual property which lies unexploited (i.e. not converted into property) due the way in which competitive pressures have turned the gaze of firms jeal­ ously inward in an effort to protect their established intellectual property. This latent potential which remains unexploited is now being realized through FOSS

231 projects, and as such, West and Gallhager encourage the development of ab­ sorptive capacities in firms with the aim of internalizing some of this external innovation. Specifically, and in some regard reflecting a sentiment set out in

Microsoft's Halloween Documents, FOSS projects should be leveraged as arenas of basic research, out of which focused, internal, processes of innovation migh be spawned.344 There is an interesting symmetry here between West and Gall­ hager's proposal for firms attemtping to capture external sources of innovation, and the UN University's MERIT survey on FOSS which conceptualizes FOSS as a potential subsidy to skills development and a form of free knowledge transfer beneficial to developing countries.345 In this regard, what the UN University's

MERIT survey illustrates nicely is how FOSS can be conceptualized in terms of a socialized form of subsidy, in which funding is provided by contributors and patrons alike. Moore and Taylor have developed a strong critique of FOSS as a means by which capital and the state may abrogate their responsibility to actively fund training and skills development, and this situates FOSS neatly in within the logic of contemporary neoliberalism. However, FOSS must also be understood as an expression of the incresingly social nature of knowledge production linked to

IT. In this productive millieu the requirement for sociability undercuts the logic of capital competition premised on exclusive property, and as such, the vitality

232 of IT-centric capitals becomes increasingly contingent upon their ability to find positive methods of harnessing their own productive apparatuses to this growing social productivity.

The conflictual identity of FOSS in the eyes of capital, being simultaneously antagonistic to established notions of intellectual property yet promising immi­ nent productivity gains, in some regard explains why capital has sought to en­ dear itself to FOSS communities through patronage taking a number of forms.

As Raymond has noted, inasmuch as FOSS may increasingly become an arena for instrumentally driven skills competitions between would-be salaried program­ mers, it also draws that special breed of contributor that is intrinsically drawn to the craft, as opposed to the work, of programming. Critically, the highest level of skill development, and community influence, tend to intersect in this relatively small, but crucial, subset of of the FOSS community, and as such, their techno­ logical preferences will tend to ripple across the community at large, and then out beyond its boundaries as the contributors move between the formal world of employment and the world of FOSS contribution. Thus contributing to FOSS, or funding FOSS projects, serves as a form of marketing or branding for capitals

- allowing them to portray themselves as honestly interested in the integrity of the craft of programming, and actively engaged at the leading edge of innova-

233 tion.3 Beyond FOSS contributors, to the extent that this strategy has paid-off, the concept of openness has come to intimate trustworthiness, largely due to the implicit claim to transparency contained within it, and this too makes FOSS a potentially lucritive brand.347

In this regard, the utility of FOSS to capital might best be conceptualized in terms of legitimacy. To the extent that FOSS posesses an air of craftsmanship

(despite the growing body of literature proclaiming that contribution is best ex­ plained in terms of conventional intrumental motives), capital's support of FOSS projects, and the FOSS community in general, may be interpreted as a bid to gain preferential access to tech-savvy producers, and consumers alike. Moreover,

FOSS illustrates how in the information economy these roles are in fact increas­ ingly linked in the economic identity of the pro-sumer. This dualistic identity, which is possesed by most FOSS contributors makes gaining access to this co­ hort especially useful. This claim must be contextualized with respect to the continuing difficulty that capital has encountered in the management of creative labour, most pointedly where its deskilling is concerned. The recasting of soft­ ware programming as work as opposed to craft has not been an easy task, nor has it been carried out to a sufficient degree. FOSS speaks to this intransigence in the labour force in part as a capitulation of capital to labour (to the extent that

234 capital is reactively rejigging its business models to accommodate FOSS), and additionally, as an alienating process whereby FOSS contribution is increasingly conceptualized in narrow instrumental terms, and its contributors portrayed as the latests manifestation of the petit-bourgeoisie.348 For this reason, any attempt to understand FOSS in terms of an imminent threat to capital misses the point.

Inasmuch as FOSS presents itself as a threat to capital, it has catalyzed and facil­ itated capital's adaptation to the requirements of the information economy, and further, is increasingly saturated with the rhetoric of the prevailing technological rationality which it increasingly reproduces in step with the rest of the capitalist assemblage.

3.5 FOSS and Rupture

It is tempting to think of FOSS in terms of a sort of mass-movement, and in some regard it is. Indeed, the number of FOSS projects, and more importantly, the number of people that contribute to FOSS projects, is staggering, and in­ creasing daily. However, inasmuch as the FOSS ecosystem might be enormous in these terms, it is a highly fragmented and asymetrical space. The fact of the matter is that for the most part, the vast majority of FOSS projects attract few developers, and tend to stagnate in a relatively short period of time.349 In light

235 of this, the great FOSS success story in actuality reflects only a small handfull

of cases, and these cases are those of most interest to capital. Further, it is in

these well established cases that the organization of the project itself tends to

become more structured, and though many of the positive spillovers generated by

peer production accrue, the peer production component of the project comprises

a large peripheral zone largely disconnected from the strategic decision making

processes located in the smaller core. As discussed eariler, this is not so much

the outcome of some nefarious plot, as it is the expression of an economizing

tendency in the network form that gives rise to a power distribution. More to

the point, however, it is in these FOSS success stories that the most direct forms

of capital intervention in the FOSS community are found, in terms of both direct

corporate control over the project (as in the cases of Mozilla, the Linux offerings

from Canonical, Novell, and Red Hat (to name a few), and MySQL (now in ques­

tion after MySQL's acquisition by Sun, and subsequently, Sun's acquisition by

Oracle)), and corporate sponsorship (as in the case of Apache). Though gaining

legitimacy in the eyes of the FOSS community is no doubt an important incentive

driving these initiatives, these patterns of intervention can also be explained in terms of the nature of the projects themselves - most of which focus on systems software (as opposed to application software).350 As such, these FOSS projects

236 are oriented towards the development of the computing platform, upon which applications and services may be constructed. This pattern of intervention then reflects a relatively predictable dynamic of capital competition, the crux of which hinges on attempting to undo rents accruing to intellectual property rights held by dominant capitals in the software industry. In this regard, the development of the FOSS ecosystem, though a diverse space in terms of the people and software it encompases, proceeds along conventional, market rational, lines.

Stallman's passion for the craft of programming combined with his rhetorical prowess undoubtedly contributed to the early misapprehension of Free Software as a quasi-communistic threat to the basic tenets of capitalism.351 Though Stall- man was frequently explicit about the fact that this was in fact not the case,

Raymond's recasting of Free Software as Open Source Software was an attempt to undo this misconception. Moreover, the rescasting of Free Software as Open

Source Software was an attempt to bring the entire concept in line with the inter­ ests of capital, and in this endeavour it has been extremely successful. FOSS has presented an avenue by which the traditional industrial publishing model may be challenged, but the intended challenger remains capital. Here the dynamics of capital competition become the forces driving technological innovation, and from the perspective of FOSS contributors this necessary intersection provides an op-

237 portunity for skills and reputation building with a potentially lucrative payoff at the end - though FOSS also holds the potential to limit the magnitude of the payoff.

In some regard the fact that FOSS can so easliy be fitted into business as usual should come as no surprise - after all if we reflect on its history we find that it shares a common genesis with the software industry it now supposedly threatens.

The digital revolution set in motion at the onset of the information economy is no more revolutionary than the one it now faces in FOSS - being that neither is particularity revolutionary in the sense that the relations of production remained, and continue to remain, fairly stable. Yet this stagnancy in the relations of production is preciesly where the potential for rupture is seated.

The rapid pace of innovation in IT, combined with its successful commodifica­ tion, has resulted in the widespread dispersion of this type of technology. This is the fundamental prerequisite for realizing Benkler's excess capacity. However, to some extent, Benkler, and the many others commenting on the quantity-quality transformation that FOSS seems so capable of (as per Linus' Law), have taken up Arendt's misunderstanding of the nature of technology - the construction of the human artifice. That vast mass of contributors that fall into the peripheral regions of the FOSS ecosystem are essentially understood as animal labourans.

238 Though the diversity of contributors is often touted as a factor promoting the rapid pace of innovation in FOSS, for the most part, theirs is the work of repro­ duction. This is undoubtedly true for most of the successful FOSS projects,352 though such an understanding (unduely) negates the possibility that creative production may be happening at the periphery, either on its own, or within an established project. Moreover, the nature of the technology itself to some extent militates against its own uninterupted functioning.

The relative usefulness of strong community norms, and the functional neces­ sity of increasingly top-down managerial models in the successful FOSS projects are a testament to the imminent volatility of IT, and of the network form more generally. Yet, it is the granular and modular nature of IT, and perhaps even the volatility endemic to this configuration, that seems to nurture the creative impulses of FOSS contributors. In this environment, the potential for fractious elements to introduce themselves into the wider community and body of code cannot be done away with, and the potential for the technology to come into conflict with itself remains. Though not a FOSS project, Napster was an itch that was scratched by a single person, yet it initiated one of the most pressing and enduring legal struggles over the preservation of intellectual property rights.

The origin of the infamous Y2K bug that initaited a global hysteria, which at

239 it most ludicrous postulated a total technological collapse of society, could be traced back to a once sound programming practice of representing dates in two, rather than four, digit numbers. ... And of course, the computer virus remains an omnipresent threat to the integrity of computer systems the world over despite the fact that each is frequently the product of the efforts of a small handfuU of people driven to produce this code for a myriad of reasons ranging from simple curriosity, to unfocused malice, to financial gain.353

If we attempt to construct FOSS as a mass movement, as it understands itself, we are largely limited to constructing it in technical terms - the FOSS movement is an argument for improved technique. Intellectual property rights become a necessary casualty from this perspective, though the recasting of Free Software as Open Source Software effectively confines the critique of property to the intel­ lectual, immaterial, domain, and even then, only on the basis that such a change would establish a superior model for linking performance and reward - tacitly re­ inforcing the basis for protecting the concept of private property in the material domain. In some sense then, the Open Source argument is fundamentally an ar­ gument over the compensation of labour. However, this conservative tendency in

Open Source is routinely perforated by those that continue to force the distinction between Free and Open, by more radical entities which attempt to build explicit

240 linkages between FOSS and radical political principles, by activists attempting to integrate new technologies into their struggles, and most importantly, by the accidents instigated by innocent (and not-so-innocoent) experimentation and by technology out-pacing itself.

These points of resistance to the business as usual of the information economy, as small, disparate, and unfocused as they might be, constitue the potential for rupture, and each is the expression of the interplay of the creative activity of the subject, and the imminent anti-rational potential of technology. To this last point,

Raymond quips: "Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected. "354 Despite being a self-appointed accidental revolutionary,355 Raymond's proposed apporpriation of technology are all too expected - in fact, decidedly counter-revolutionary. Nonetheless, this unexpected utility, excess capacity, and peripheral activity, serves as the engine of rupture. In commenting on the importance of film, Benjamin notes that it

"extends our comprehension of the the necessities which rule our lives ... manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action ... [and] ... introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanlaysis to unconscious impulses."356 These effects obtain from the increase in optical resolution that the camera delivers, and it is in this respect that it is important to note that resolution is an expression of

241 granularity. The fine grained nature of IT, which is in turn expressed in the fine grained nature of the (idealized) FOSS labour process, facilitates an analogous function. What matters then, when we are concerned with the truly revolutionary capacity of FOSS or more generally new technologies, is identifying those people who are drawn by fascination to, or otherwise wander into, this immense and unexpected field of action.

Hackers.

242 4 Workers and Hackers

If the digital revolution of the late 20 century has contributed one iconic fig­ ure to the popular culture, it is undoubtedly that of the hacker. Yet, as most inquiries into the culture of hackers, and testimonies from hackers themselves will assert, this popular representation is routinely misinformed, and is not so much the product of actual historical record, but rather the product of media sensationalism.357 However, as serious studies into the cultural contours of the digital revolution have become more plentiful, efforts to correct the mistake of the media have resulted in a recasting of the figure of the hacker in terms which selectively suppress certain aspects of the hacker identity while emphasizing oth­ ers. Critically, the emergence of the hacker, as a discretely defined category of identity, and the subsequent, and ongoing, negotiation of its content, are inti­ mately linked to the emergence of Free Software, and its subsequent reinvention as Open Source Software. The synchronicity in these shifts, which are not only

243 conceptual, but also ethical and economic, obtains for two reasons: First, given the intermediation of subject and object in technology, hackers and the technol­ ogy they are concerned with are codetermining. Second, as components within the technological apparatus of capitalism, both are subject to a broader set of determinations in the form of the logic of capital - technological rationality.

In the most general terms, and drawing from the Jargon File (which consti­ tutes a sort of constitution for hackers), Pekka Himanen defines hackers as being

"people who program enthusiastically and who believe that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to information and the computing resources wherever possible."358 From this definition we can identify three constituent components of the hacker identity: an enthusiasm for the activ­ ity of programming, a definite ethical disposition to information, and a functional resolution of the former with the latter. The third aspect of this definition draws a link explicitly between the hacker and Free Software, though it is crucial to note that in formal terms this definition is not antagonistic to the principle of Open

Source Software. However, this formal reconciliation between this definition of hacker, and the principle of OSS does in some respect seem like an abrogation of the spirit of the term hacker.

244 Though not specifically concerned with hackers, Richard Florida's high profile inquiry into the so-called creative class makes the point that the Homebrew

Computer Club figures centrally in both the histories of FOSS and hackers.359

Rather than focusing on technical acumen or enthusiasm, Florida's singling out of this specific historical moment is informed by a desire to link bohemian elements of 1970s youth culture, and specifically social justice activism and complimentary counter-cultural phenomena (many high profile club members were active in such movements), to the cultural dimension of the then emerging digital economy.

Thus, according to Florida, inasmuch as the collegial research norms of academia were carried over into the core of this new cultural and economic configuration, so too were a host of liberal, and to a lesser extent, radical political values. These cultural contours of the early hacker community suggest that among at least some influential members, the free aspect of FOSS (though the concept had not formally emerged at that time) was more likely taken as a substantive ethical claim, than a formal economic claim. The mechanical dimension of the ethical foundation here is, as most commentators on the subject have noted, the by now

(hopefully) familiar claim that technological innovation demands the free flow of information. However, this rationale is linked to a more pressing underlying assumption that makes a very critical demand on what it is to be a hacker.

245 Specifically, that for hackers there is some sort of essential connection between the production of information and identity - to impede the flow of information is to limit the conditions necessary for the development of the self.

This essential connection between the production of information and identity in hackers is frequently articulated by likening hackers to artisans, or craftsmen - people that retain near complete control over the material (or in this case, imma­ terial) productive activities they carry out.360 What matters for being a hacker then is not so much the particular nature of the activity performed, but rather the autonomous will and capacity for the production of information. From this perspective, the criteria delimiting the definition for hacker broadens, and indeed, the jargon file "emphasizes that a hacker is basically an expert or enthusiast of any kind."361 In some sense then, from this extremely broad definition, hacker be­ comes a sort of shorthand for creative person. There is an appealing inclusiveness to this definition, and if we apply it we can find examples of people throughout history, carrying out a wide array of activities, concerned with just as wide an array of materials and technologies, that might reasonably be described as hack­ ers. However, as Tim Jordan has noted, if we take such an expansive definition, the concept of the hack, and by extension the hacker, looses its content. For this reason, Jordan asserts that hackers should be associated with the specific

246 technologies that give them their historic character, and gave us the word in the first place.362 363

Jordan's approach to the topic of hackers is critically concerned with their historically embedded activity, the hack, which he defines as "a material practice that produces a difference or something new in a computer, network and/or com­ munications technology."364 In taking this focus Jordan emphasizes the metabolic moment where an activity centred on a concrete specific technology encounters technology in its social abstract form. For this reason, hackers and the activity of hacking are principally concerned with negotiating and resisting technological determination under historically specific technological conditions. As Jordan has noted, this resistance is the creation of something new. This constitutive act, however, introduces a political conflict into the hacker identity over what counts as legitimately creative - which is as much a material technological determination as it is a political determination. It is this latter aspect of the hack which makes defining what properly constitutes a hacker a difficult proposition, and it is the overemphasis of this ethical dimension that leads to accepting problematicaly expansive definitions of the term.

Inasmuch as we can broadly define a hacker as any sort of enthusiast, do­ ing so without providing a substantial analysis for our reasoning renders the

247 term a meaningless catch-all. In the context of a discussion of FOSS, the digital economy, and high technology capitalism, taking such a broad definition seems especially nonsensical, as a more particular understanding of hacker, concerned with computers and the creation and manipulation of their software and hard­ ware, is immediately implied. Moreover, the more-or-less consistent emphasis placed on the enthusiasm, inquisitiveness, ingenuity, novelty and playfulness of the hacker's approach to engaging technology suggests a specific dispositional aspect to the definition that must be considered. On this basis, the concept is defined at a minimum by a necessary set of descriptive technical activities

(ex. programming), and additionally by a certain disposition of the individual to the specific technological object within the activity itself, wherein aspects of the method, the outcome, or both, are characterized as being technically outside of convention or good practice (i.e. a conventional end is achieved using uncon­ ventional means, an unconventional end is achieved using conventional means, an unconventional end is achieved using unconventional means). The ethical dimension of the hacker identity, pertaining to personal motivation, creativity, political conviction, social deviance etc. is crucially important to understanding how hackers figure into processes of social transformation, but lies well beyond this minimum technical-dispositional threshold. To speak of a hacker is to speak

248 of a person that engages the technology of their time in a very specific fashion, regardless of motitivation. The need to add an ethical dimension to the analysis of hackers accrues from the need to explain the social implication of the hack, and not from the need to identify it as such. The tension created by juxtaposing technical and ethical content within the category hacker in fact underscores the dually determined, or as set out the first section of this work - interdetermining, character of technology, while the desire to impose a definite character on the ethical content reflects the uncritical reduction of the category in step with the prevailing technological rationality. The complaint on the part of hackers and their historians that their image has been maligned in the popular media reflects this persistent tension within the concept, and additionally its reductive reso­ lution inasmuch as the complaint insists on an ethical operationalization of our understanding of who can properly be called a hacker.

For the most part, the figure of the hacker entered into the popular conscious­ ness by way of the media's attention to the then relatively new phenomenon of computer related criminal activity. As such, the media's appropriation of the hacker moniker tended (and still tends) to substitute the rhetoric of creativity for that of destructivity - a redefinition which to many hackers sundered the es­ sential meaning of the term. Eric Raymond suggests that this malappropriation

249 crops up somewhere around 1984, and dismisses the people that the media applied the moniker hacker to as little more than "computer vandals" .365 In an effort to reclaim the hacker moniker then, many true hackers insist on drawing the distinc­ tion between hackers and crackers, or in computer security oriented circles, white hats and black hats. According to the Jargon File, which Raymond edits and maintains, "[t]hough crackers often call themselves 'hackers', they aren't (they typically have neither significant programming ability, nor Internet expertise, nor experience with UNIX or other true multi-user systems)."366 (It is notable that this differentiation hinges almost entirely on an appeal to skill, expertise, and technological sophistication.)

In apparent contrast to the hacker, who sets out to create something new, the cracker's activity, the crack, is principally focused on the illicit transfer of control over computers and networks.367 However, accepting this distinction hinges upon how we understand the creative process, and specifically causation. While it is largely true that crackers do not seem to create anything per se, this is a formal reduction. Code is in fact created to facilitate the cracking process, new information is generated with respect to discovered vulnerabilities in systems, and most importantly, the crack itself often serves as the impetus to drive forward innovation in computer and network security. Moreover, if resisting technological

250 determination is a defining aspect of being a hacker, crackers in many regards seem to take up this mission in a more literal sense. In this regard, it is hard to make a purely functional distinction between hackers and crackers. However, this does not mean that these terms are reducible to one another - that would be historically naive and unforgivably presumptuous. Rather, in order to draw a distinction between hackers and crackers, we must identify what underpins the creation-destruction dichotomy. In the context of capitalism, this is inherently linked to the institution of private property, and as such, the distinction between hackers and crackers lies in the relationship that each has to the prevailing system of social property relations.

As a vandal the cracker is a profaner of property - his principal activity is trespassing.368 The hacker on the other hand is an artisan. This distinction is confirmed if we reflect on the media's presentation of the threat that crackers

(including those labeled hackers) pose. As computer technology is incorporated into increasingly diverse areas of life, the nature of this threat also diversifies, though for the most part, aside from acts of mischief, it remains predominately wed to the circumvention of digital rights management (DRM - essentially digital copy protection), corporate espionage, and the theft of personal information for the purpose of fraud. Property remains the central axis about which the danger of

251 the cracker revolves. The issue encountered, however, in drawing the distinction between hacker and cracker in the prevailing social property relations is that social property relations are in fact a component of technology socially considered.

Thus, inasmuch as both hackers and crackers resist technological determination, the actions of each must, at least occasionally, come into conflict with prevailing social property relations. In the case of crackers this is well documented. In the case of hackers, it is worth recalling the less-than-friendly relationship that the then young Microsoft shared with The Homebrew Computer Club, as set out in Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists, antipathy towards the concept of Free

Software, and consequently the logic informing the recasting of Free Software as

Open Source Software, all of which are instances where hackers have entered into conflict with prevailing social property relations. A more contemporary example presents itself in Apple's uneasy relationship with hackers over the matter of jailbreaking369 the software running on some of Apple's electronic devices, and specifically whether or not doing so constitutes a violation of copyright and/or terms of use.370 In this regard, the hacker-cracker dichotomy glosses over the ways in which both identities contains aspects of the other. Maintaining a hard distinction between the two is not possible.

This more fluid understanding, rooted in social property relations, of the

252 hacker-cracker dichotomy is important because it asks us to situate these people, and their activities, within the logic of capitalism. In some regard, this is in fact a task that has for the most part been (inadequately) carried out in an essentially unconscious manner. Though Jordan's hackers versus technological determinism thesis largely avoids this problem, his assertion that "[h] ackers are the warriors of this everyday technological determinism" points towards the sort of ascriptive problem that is in question here.371 As conventionally treated, the concept of the hacker is shot through with the rhetoric of war and conflict. This thematic is most obviously expressed in the popularly held notion of a revolution in digital technology, and, is likewise captured in Raymond's description of himself as a revolutionary (albeit an "accidental" one). Much of this is of course hyperbole, yet the semantic contours of the hacker discourse strongly suggest a conviction that hackers are in some way connected to a wider process of transformation.

The nature of the hacker's role within the transformative process, however, is conventionally understood as restricted to purely technological phenomena, and the integration of the political and economic dimensions into the analysis is often foregone (i.e. technology is treated as determined in its concrete particular form).

Yet there are clearly political and economic dimensions to the hacker culture, though these have arguably been minimized over time at the level of discourse.

253 Consider the following excerpt taken from The Conscience of a Hacker (The

Hacker Manifesto) authored in 1986 by a young hacker identifying himself as

The Mentor:

This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals. Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.372

Beyond its youthful angst and idealism, this document is a particularly in­ teresting contribution to the history of hackerdom for the fact that it not only presents a critique of what The Mentor takes as (in)justice (in both economic and political terms), but also attempts to locate itself in a community of like minded people. To call this is a political document would be a misappropriation, yet it does link the concept of the hacker to a social formation, and in turn, to a very specific set of political struggles - those concerning the commodification of information and technology. In this regard understanding what role hackers, and by extension their activities and creations, play in the process of capitalist repro-

254 duction demands that we develop an understanding of how hackers are situated within the capitalist class structure.

4.1 Advanced Capitalism and Class

It is an unfortunate necessity that almost any discussion of class with respect to workers under the conditions of advanced capitalism must start off with a defense of method. This is largely due to the fact that critics of class-based anal­ ysis generally restrict their understanding of class to a dehistoricized treatment of Marx's original works (and I suspect frequently a very small subset therein, and/or second-hand accounts thereof). The traditional Marxist class model then is routinely dismissed as an anachronism that, while it might once have provided an accurate description of society, no longer pertains simply because the working class no longer exists.373 This claim is usually substantiated by one or a com­ bination of two observations: First, that the proletariat as described by Marx was an industrial working class, and, in the leading capitalist economies, that category of worker has been diminishing since at least the mid-20tfe century, and particularly since the shift in economic activity towards computer-centric forms of work. Second, and relatedly but more substantively founded, Marx defined the two classes of capitalist society, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, in terms of

255 the owners of the means of production (the bourgeoisie), and those that must sell their labour for subsistence (the proletariat),374 this distinction, however, based on who owns the means of production, no longer pertains as it cannot account for the class location of management, skilled professionals, freelancers, and in fact, as Florida claims, the entire creative class, since they are their own means of production.375

As Stanley Aronowitz has pointed out, the rejection of the Marxist notion of class, aside from principally ideological motives, can be attributed to the apparent fragmentation of the the two class model that manifested as the rapid expansion of a new middle class.376 In this fragmentation, the concept of class becomes divorced from its material conditions (social property relations), and is redeployed as a semantic category mapped to a social stratification theory - thereby allowing us to speak of lower, middle, upper, and even creative classes of people. This last category of people, the creative class, has gained a relatively prominent position within the discourse on late capitalism, due in part to Richard Florida's work which positively correlates them and their activities with economic growth, and it is within this class that we can (for the most part) locate hackers, and the activity of FOSS production. To be clear though, Florida does insist that his creative class is in fact economically, as opposed to semantically, defined to the extent

256 "that its- economic function both underpins and informs its members' social, cultural and lifestyle choices."377 What is crucial to focus on here, however, is the actual content of this apparent economic determination. This can principally be explained in terms of the postmaterialism thesis, elements of which are reflected in the more radical post-scarcity thesis, and in this respect, the functional capacity for creativity is implicitly linked to relative material abundance. To this end, it is notable that Florida also emphasizes that consumption (of lifestyle amenities), as opposed to productive activity which dominates the Marxist class model, figures centrally for the creative class.378 This is notable because as Aronowitz points out, "[t]he main criterion for middle-class membership is one's participation in the huge consumer celebration."379

Aronowitz's remark on consumption is provided to illustrate how Marx's model of class distinction based around ownership of the means of production, has been reinterpreted by critics of class theory as a simple distinction between the propertied and the property less. This is an erroneous interpretation of the theory. Florida's claim, however, that the members of the creative class are their own means of production, sets out a more sophisticated claim that cannot be dismissed as simply as a bad interpretation. In some regard, Florida's argument finds its conceptual pedigree in Locke's claim that "every man has a property

257 in his own person."380 (This on its own is notable for the fact that the Lockean conception of property has been invoked a number of times in defending FOSS against allegations of being anti-private property.) This assumption is in some regard the underpinning of human capital theory, social capital theory (with the significant exception of Bourdieu), and Florida's own creative capital theory.

Each of these perspectives attempts to explain processes of economic and political transformation in terms of material returns accruing from cultural phenomena rooted at the level of the individual, such that the cultural dimensions of the individual share an equivalence with capital considered economically - people are treated as capital embodied. As such, the accumulation of these kinds of non- traditional capital is treated as a strong determinant for political and economic transformation, and implicitly as a sufficient substitute for, and counterbalance to, the democratic ownership and control over traditional forms of capital. More generally, the analytical emphasis placed on consumption corresponds with the ongoing development of capitalism, under which social status which at one time was in part determined by one's productive activity, is increasingly determined by one's capacity for consumption.381 This shift in the status valuation of productive activity corresponds to the ongoing process of deskilling which has fundamentally undermined the craft-like or artisanal qualities of many forms of work. The fact

258 that occupations within the creative core might be able to (at least temporar­ ily) resist such a skill erosion, and consequently command a higher wage, then provides a dual mechanism for the acquisition of social status for the creative class: status accruing from an elevated capacity for consumption, and status ac­ cruing from the engagement in a somewhat craft-like or otherwise highly skilled occupation. Critically, as presented here, the discourse around status, and by extension, the middle-class, creative class, etc., can be linked to known forms of labour discipline enacted in the service of capital accumulation. Finally, inas­ much as the realm of work may be considered a sphere of relative unfreedom in terms of the extent to which workers may act autonomously (though perhaps less-so in the case of creative occupations), under modern capitalism the worker is ostesibly treated as an adult in the role of the consumer (in contradistinction to the paternalistic tinge of her identity as a worker), to the extent that consump­ tion becomes an avenue for the exercise of autonomous choice.382 This veneer of autonomy then plays into the suppression of a serious class discourse, as class is reconstructed as a highly fragmented model for social status which is increasingly operationalized in terms of consumption.

Oddly, as much a Florida defines the creative class in terms of the type of work they perform, and the kinds of lifestyles they lead, his initial claim that the

259 category is conceptually rooted in economic determinations, which is absolutely correct, actually undermines any claim that the Marxist model of class no longer obtains. Though Florida dismisses both human capital and social capital theories as inadequate alternatives to his creative capital theory, it should be noted that

Bourdieu's theory of social capital, which Florida takes as underspecified and therefore lacking in explanatory power, actually deals with the complex interac­ tion of social status and economic class at a level of sophistication that is perhaps not appreciated, and in a manner which underscores why the Marxist class model remains relevant to this discussion. Though Bourdieu offers up a theory of social capital, social capital is presented as one among a number of forms of capital, including cultural capital and of course, economic capital. More importantly though, inasmuch as the accumulation of economic capital is simultaneously the means enabling, and ends motivating, the accumulation of social capital and cul­ tural capital, ultimately all forms of capital are reducible to economic capital.383

For Bourdieu then, social capital and cultural capital may be treated as sym­ bolic capital, which functions as an overlay for economic capital, smoothing out vicissitudes of the market that are routinely encountered by the individual. This added veneer of symbolic capital entails the incorporation of ostensibly diseco- nomic qualities into the activities of individuals, but only on the grounds that

260 ultimately an economic outcome will be achieved.384 (Here economism is defined in relative, as opposed to absolute terms, and with a longer run perspective.) This last point is interesting for the fact that Bourdieu develops this argument through an analysis of gift economies, a phenomenon which has also been routinely used in explaining the motivation driving FOSS contribution - FOSS contribution is a gift given with the expectation of a future pecuniary return.

Beyond the matter that the supposed dissapearance of class is in fact merely an optic pertaining to an ascendent theory of social stratification, apparently emprically founded claims that Marx's theory of class no longer applies are gen­ erally founded on a highly schematic, and therefore erroneous, reading of Marx's class theory. Inasmuch as Marx's theory of capitalist society espouses a two class model, it was never Marx's intention to suggest that capitalist society slotted all of its members into one of two classes. In addressing this fact, E.P. Thompson points us towards Marx's assertion that: In all forms of society there is one form of production the predom­ inates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it.385

In this regard, Marx's claim that capitalist society is organized into two classes must be understood, like many of Marx's arguments, as pertaining to the struc-

261 tural tendencies of capitalism, which in this case define the dominant mode of social relation, and therefore, and as Marx states, the centre of gravity giving shape and order to other types of social relations not discretely contained within it. It is historical fact, of which Marx was certainly aware, that capitalist soci­ ety, even at the height of the industrial revolution in England was never reduced to merely two classes of people. On this basis, Thompson points out that erro­ neous treatments of class will frequently concieve of class either as an empirically reductive sociological category, or as a heuristic category.386 In the case of the former, the error acrues from importing a static (i.e. dehistoricized) empirical framework into the class analysis. In this case, the historicity of the metrics that comprise the empirical model is suppressed culminating in analytical error.

Similarly, where class is conceptualized heuristically, class becomes an ahistori- cal theoretical schema, into which nothing will fit, save those social phenomena which informed the original formulation of the schema. In both cases the chang­ ing nature of social relations and behaviour over time are not considered. Rather, when we are setting out to analyze class in the context of capitalism, no matter at what stage of its development, we should expect to find a myriad of social classes that do not easily fit into the conventionally understood bourgeoisie-proletariat model, though we should expect that the dominant social determinant of the

262 nature of the social relations between these classes will be the processes of com­ modity production.

Understanding class in terms of a social centre of gravity whose expression and composition in detail necessarily changes over time is especially pertinent to our understanding of class as it exists under increasingly more advanced stages of capitalism. Under the terms of real subsumption, wherein the entire apparatus of capitalist society is engaged in the process of valorization, what matters are not the technical details over who owns what, but rather, what overarching purpose is served by the extant social property relations.387 As Thompson suggests, we should distinguish between class and classes, to the extent that class should be treated as an "historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness", whereas classes are descriptors for a bundle of discrete social phenomenon.388 The concept of a unity is critical in this definition of class, as class then exists not as a thing, but as a relationship between people. A dualized class structure remains an objective feature of capitalism, though we may observe, as Florida does, the existence of classes in society which seem to deviate away from it. While bipolarity remains an objective feature of capitalist class structure, these deviations constitute the gradation of the two fundamental classes of society

263 into their functionaries, the most privileged of which take a share of the surplus.

This blurs the class dichotomy but does not do away with it.389 Further, this in part explains the apparent allure of the postmaterialism thesis, to the extent that what the postmaterialism thesis erroneously identifies as class mobility cum class fragmentation, and therefore the decay of the Marxist class model, is in fact, a mode of class discipline instituted via an economy of punishment.390

As Debord has argued, in the Bolshevik revolution, an image of the working class (the romantic revolutionary martyr) arose that stood in radical opposition to the working class itself.391 This hypostatized image of the working class not only militated against its continued historical development, but took the concept of class to the grave with it when the Soviet Union eventually collapsed, officially confirming the end of ideology thesis, the corollary of the postmaterialism thesis, in the eyes of many onlookers. What remains of it haunts many modern discus­ sions of class in such a profound way that it is able to turn very keen eyes away from the objective reality of a capitalist class structure with the ultimate effect of inspiring the denial of class, and/or the confusion of class and classes. What is more troubling though, and potentially damning where a Marxist theory of class is concerned, is that this spectral power does not confine its presence to the realm of academia, cultured conversation, or other lofty arenas of esoterica, but rather,

264 is an in-built component of the Happy Consciousness. This is particularly trou­

bling on the grounds that, as the quote above from E.P. Thompson suggests, the existence of class entails its constitution in the consciousness of its constituent members.392 The issue at hand here of course is that, this consciousness may not exist - and consequently whether or not we are right to speak of class, or to situate people within class structures, literally against their will, remains an unanswered question.

In dealing with this issue, Aronowitz sets out the rather neat deduction that if we can speak of class decomposition (as presupposed in absolute terms by the postmaterialist thesis and evidenced historically by the decline of the tra­ ditional industrial working class in advanced capitalist countries), then this is a positive indication of social struggle - regardless of the fact that this struggle may not conform to the conventional image of class struggle that we hold.393

Antonio Negri's work adds substantively to this claim to the extent that Negri attributes the apparent dissolution of a coherent working class to the ongoing implementation of a neoliberal policy of deregulation in the labour market which has fractured the concept of class in terms of its efficacy as an identity, resulting in the articulation of social struggle in non-class based terms. Yet the project of deregulation is inherently that of a dual-class society, targeting the working

265 class specifically, and in this respect, the rise of identity politics is in fact symp­ tomatic of underlying class antagonisms.394 This assertion that class remains a legitimate level of analysis, is further strengthened by Marx's original assertion that technological advance will ultimately reduce the distinctiveness of individ­ uals' labouring activities (thus edging ever closer to the concrete realization of abstract socially necessary labour), and consequently, natural/biological distinc­ tions between workers will become the prevalent markers of distinctiveness and framework for consciousness.395 Braverman keeps his argument quite close to

Marx's, extending patterns of Taylorization to as wide an array of occupations as possible, and while this holds for many examples, both Marx and Braverman to some extent minimize consideration over how technological advance creates new forms of labour, some of which are in fact highly skilled, and of which others resist deskilling via Taylorist methods.396 However, this too plays into the frag­ mentation of class as a concept inasmuch as these new occupations are frequently considered to fall outside of the traditional category working class, while within those older occupations that are treated as remaining within the category, the importance of category itself in terms of it being a determinant of identity and consciousness is minimized by an upswing in the relative import of biological and cultural distinctiveness. The net effect then is a systematic fragmentation

266 in the appearance of class as a social category which must be understood as an expression of the fundamental class antagonisms endemic to capitalism.

What Aronowitz and Negri focus on in this regard is not class as a thing - which as Thompson has suggested, it is not - but rather, class struggle, and as such we are able to conceptualize a myriad of social struggles, and their asso­ ciated social formations in class terms. According to Aronowitz, it is through these struggles that class potentially constitutes itself. In Aronowitz's words,

"[wjhether a social formation or a constellation of social formations becomes a class in the historical sense depends on whether their struggles effect a cleavage in social relations and pose a significant change in these relations at a specific time and place."397 Thus, social struggles are not class struggles, but struggles over class formation. The contingency that this understanding establishes makes this an appealing perspective, however, it also seems to impose something of an ex post analytical requirement - only once a class articulates itself as such are we able to confirm that a class struggle has been underway. This is in some regard a respectfully humble approach to the issue inasmuch as we can never claim any struggle to be a class struggle with any certainty until it has absolutely been es­ tablished as such after the fact. On the other hand, this perspective also allows us to suspect all struggles of being class struggles, thereby providing a considerable

267 footing for potentially problematic speculation. What is a more pressing concern in this perspective, however, is the consistent assertion that what is at stake is the emergence of a cohesive working class, a phenomenon which is coextensive not only with a cleavage in social relations but also with a reduction or simplification of social relations. This is an overstructuralized perspective to the extent that it takes Marx's abstract model of class under capitalism as imminent reality (i.e. it errs heurisitcally with respect to Thompson's argument). It is more likely that extant capitalist social relations will remain highly differentiated, though gov- erend by the dominant bourgeois-proletariat dichotomy, throughout the tenure of capitalism.

Aronowitz's vision for the future moment of praxis, and Negri's to a lesser extent, espouses Marx's class theory in a reductive fashion wherein class strug­ gle is a totalized social phenomenon describing the conflict between a coherent bourgeoisie and proletariat. The prerequisite for such a state of affairs then is the synchronous, or at least sufficiently cumulative, development of a radicalized class consciousness among an expansive working class. Faced with this immense challenge, both Aronowitz and Negri attempt to set out the conditions which they feel will lead organically to the development of a working class conscious­ ness, but ultimately restrict this possibility to a small critical group that will in

268 some respect act as a vanguard for the unactivated remainder of the imminent working class (thereby evading the problem of having to theorize a mass shift in consciousness).398 The obvious problem with any vanguardist argument is the inherent potential it possesses for undermining the proposition that the agents driving forward social transformation (the working class) possess an authentic

(as opposed to prescribed) working class consciousness - if any such thing exists.

We might attempt to circumvent this issue, as Negri does, by reducing the role of the vanguard or party to that of a functional means of organization and coor­ dination. However, both Aronowitz and Negri take the capacity for (though for

Aronowitz, not the fact of) self-organization as a requisite quality for any class, and this seems somewhat at odds with any defense of a vanguard or party.399

Aronowitz's turn to a vanguard seems largely to be the product of considera­ tions regarding the practical matter of linking identity politics, which Aronowitz sees expressed in social movements, and as militating against class consciousness, to their classed underpinnings, though the process via which such a catalyzing body might emerge is left somewhat murky. For the most part, the conscious­ ness forging process is presented as an amalgam of potentialities brought about through technological innovation, the transmutation of privilege among middle- class youth into meaningful dissidence, and the tumult of the anti-globalization

269 movement. This extremely broad framework corresponds with Aronowitz's move away from discussions of value production and towards power, and relatedly, where the index of social transformation is concerned, his shift in focus from property relations to social relations more generally. Negri on the other hand, in suggesting a role for a vanguard, presents a very precise explanation for why it is that, and where from, this vanguard will emerge. (Notably, Negri's argu­ ment is quite compatible with Aronowitz's though it ultimately lacks many of the contours of traditional Marxism that Aronowitz tries to maintain.)

Negri's revolutionary subject emerges in the form of the socialized worker, and specifically from those occupations that lie at the heart of this entity real­ ized in the era of real subsumption. Though the concept of the socialized worker describes the collective worker in relation to her location within the totally sys­ tematized apparatus of valorization under capitalism (thereby sundering the for­ mal delineation between productive and unproductive labour), at its core reside workers who carry out the abstract intellectual work that enables this produc­ tive collectivization. This enabling is intimately connected to the production and maintenance of the means of communication, and in this context the abstract na­ ture of intellectual labour comes into contradiction with itself, manifesting itself as both the immediate product of an individual's own labour, and also as the work

270 of a multitude of other workers. This recurrent conflict between communicative and intellectual collectivity in the object and means of production on the one side, and the market imposed individuated experience of the labouring subject on the other, serves as the anvil upon which the alienated consciousness may be broken

(or at least bent).400 Moreover, in the era of neoliberal restructuring, the reality of the relationship between the state, the market, and the individual, constantly shoots away from the theoretical ideals which inform the discourse on liberal democracy and capitalism and are established as common sense. Combined with an acceleration of all social relationships, a product of technological innovation and its historically specific integration into the apparatus of accumulation, the disjuncture between a perpetual state of reform in politics and the economy, and the idealized notion of how the state and the market should work, this context exacerbates the conflicted consciousness of the intellectual worker.401 In time,

Negri's intellectual subject becomes the catalyst for radicalism in the socialized worker, and from a functional perspective assumes the role of a vanguard.

What is crucial to note here is that inasmuch as Aronowitz and Negri set out to reseat highly skilled, academic, professional, high-tech labour and ostensibly non-class-oriented social movements within a class discussion by taking recourse to the concept of real subsumption and distinguishing the appearance of class

271 from its objective structural existence, while Florida (and like minded postmate­ rialism, Information Society, and End of Ideology thinkers) mistakenly denies the existence of class based on its merely apparent disappearance, all of these thinkers place the category of worker engaged in cutting edge IT work front-and-centre in their theories of social transformation (to the extent that Florida actually has a theory of transformation, and not simply reproduction). Generally speaking, the critical position that this group of workers finds themselves in accrues from their connection to the production of information and knowledge, the central location of information and knowledge in the accumulative apparatus of advanced capital­ ism, and more specifically from the high cost of acquiring the necessary skills to carry out this type of work, and the higher demands for autonomy in the labour process imposed by the nature of intellectual/creative labour. Generally stated, this group of workers is connected to the economic linchpin of high technology capitalism, realize an above average capacity for consumption, and yet are less restrained, and potentially even antagonistic to, traditional forms of labour disci­ pline. Florida argues that these people are rejigging the capitalist wage bargain, and in the process, generating new avenues for economic growth. Aronowitz and

Negri on the other hand argue that these people have an exceptionally intimate and immediate relationship with the contradictions of capitalism, and as such,

272 represent a potential vanguard that might crystallize a wide array of fractured social struggles into a more-or-less cohesive class struggle. Florida's position is problematic because it denies the inherently classed nature of capitalism, and in doing so, confuses a shift in specific occupational characteristics within the work­ ing class for the seed of economic reform, and even then only within the limited framework of the continuation of the established wage relation. Aronowitz's po­ sition is problematic because almost any social struggle might be cast as a class struggle, yet the image of class struggle retains an somewhat industrial character which no longer fits with modern conditions. Negri sets out an excellent, and quite plausible explanation for where fractures in alienated consciousness might emerge from, yet if as Debord remarked, the Bolshevik revolution gave us an image of the working class that stood in radical opposition to the working class itself, then Negri might be recreating this problem, but this time with the image of the radicalized academic that emerged from Paris in 1968.

With respect to the matter of a vanguard, inasmuch as a revolutionary van­ guard might serve as an expedient means to adress the apparent problem of a deradicalized and fractured working class for Aronowitz and Negri, this fix a.) misunderstands class to the extent that it insists on the (at least eventual) exis­ tence of a coherent working class, in which b.) a properly oriented and radicalized

273 consciousness may be established. Neither aspect of this assumption is convinc­ ing. Beyond the, already addressed, matter of the unproblematic multiplicity of classes within the two class structure of capitalism, the assumption that a proper homogeneous working class consciousness is attainable, or can be instilled, posits a pervasive working class false consciousness that is offensive and theoretically and historically indefensible. Vanguardism posits either what amounts to a natu­ ral inability of some (and often most) members of the working class to effectively understand themselves, or a degree of alienation so complete that an identical outcome is reached. In either case, a substantial proportion of the working class is divested of any kind of radical, or even simply resistant, capacity. This assump­ tion implies that those who are not divested of such a capacity (the potential vanguard) are either naturally gifted with a superior critical faculty sufficient to see through the apparatus of subsumption, or have through some circumstance, at least partially evaded this apparatus. This line of thinking must either essen- tialize the rational agent of class struggle or theorize the possibility for resistance in terms of social structural features, thereby dismissing any sense of agency from the process of class struggle. By extension, if we are to maintain, as Aronowitz and Negri do, that class is constituted through the activities of its own mem­ bers then vanguardism is problematic for the fact that the authenticity of the

274 actions of the bulk of the working class must be called into question. More fun­ damentally, the notion that there might be some proper class consciousness is patently ahistorical for the fact that the content of any class consciousness must reflect the historical specificity of the social property relations which bound the lives of those which posess it. On this basis, class consciousness (whether false, proper, or other) must necessarily be marked by multiplicity. In short, van- guardist arguments fetishize a sort of revolutionary intellect available only to the few, and in doing so implicitly attempt to delegitimize the instinctive, emotive and self-interested activities of the thoroughly alienated, thereby excluding these activities from the model of praxis. In doing so, vanguardist theories ignore the long and exceedingly consistent history of labour's resistance to capital. Failure to apprehend this long history of resistance resistance as such can only be ex­ plained in terms of limiting the understanding of class struggle to something akin to a highly romaticized notion of class war in which two great armies set upon each other in decisive conflict. Rather, class struggle manifests in a wide array of forms, on as many scales, and more often than not, is expressed as a reaction to the immediate circumstances of those involved (i.e. expressed with historical urgency), not with respect to the need to move the dialectic forward. Historical transience almost ensures that these conflicts will be short lived, and that their

275 agents will go on to apparently contradict their own class interests at some later point. But this is not ignorance or false consciousness. This is class.

We continue to be able to talk about class seriously under the conditions of advanced capitalism, and we are able to locate the new occupational categories of workers that do not fit the traditional notion of a working class nevertheless within it. We are able to do so because, regardless of whether or not certain groups of workers are their own means of production, or own their own means of production, the fact of the matter remains that for the most part, the labour of these workers exists for the service of an accumulative apparatus which is funda­ mentally premised on the separation of workers from the means of production - the dominant social property relation. However, in situating these occupational categories within the working class it does not follow that the people who fill their ranks, any more than other members of the working class, will achieve an unalienated consciousness, nor should we presume that they will serves as a cat­ alyst for class formation. To think in this manner reduces the understanding of technology to a set of concrete technologies that are conceptually separated from the technological rationality with which the entire (abstract) social technology is shot through. This in mind, what people engaged in the labour of information and knowledge production obtain is a heightened potential for taking action, but

276 the extent and the nature of this action must remain unspecified. Hackers in fact exemplify this condition. Though largely situated within the working class in terms of their relationship to the accumulative apparatus of capitalism, fre­ quently the ways in which hackers articulate their identities - both in speech and action, exhibit contradictory characters - intimating a resistant (though rarely ex- plicity class oriented) consciousness in one moment, and a repressed, or repressive consciousness in the next. In some regard, the consideration of identity exceeds both the categories of hacker and class as established to this point, in that iden­ tity pertains to the the specific individuated expression of both, and which need not be overtly identical with either. However, the consideration of identity with respect to both hackers and class remains necessary for the fact that identity serves as the prism in which social relations and technological dispositions are refracted into their myriad of individual expressions.

4.2 Hackers and Class

As presented earlier, the prevailing economic explanation for the motive to con­ tribute to FOSS projects lies in the notion of signaling. To the extent that there is a significant overlap between hackers and FOSS contributors, this would seem to indicate the absence of an unalienated consciousness among many hackers, as

277 the signaling motive remains framed in predominantly instrumental pecuniary

terms. However, this economic explanation does not entirely match up with the

sort of motivations that hackers themselves espouse when addressing the matter

of what drives their actions. In attempting to explain what motivates hackers,

Linus Torvalds establishes a sequential three tier model comprised of survival,

social life, and entertainment. According to Torvalds, "A "hacker" is a person

who has gone past using his computer for survival ... to the next two stages. He

(or, in theory but all too seldom in practice, she) uses the computer for his social ties - email and the Net are great ways to have a community. But to the hacker a computer is also entertainment. Not the games, not the pretty pictures on the

Net. The computer itself is entertainment."402 In many regards, Torvalds' three tier model of motivations adheres closely to postmaterialist reasoning. However, his argument that hackers are motivated by the desire for a social life, and by the fact that computers in and of themselves constitute a form of entertainment, goes somewhat beyond the more reductive postmateralism thesis.

The emphasis on social life conforms with Negri's assertions to some extent, though Torvalds' intentions in making this claim seem rather apolitical, and

Negri's claim only holds if we can find a emergent working class consciousness amongst hacker communities. For the most part this seems to be lacking. Most

278 obviously, in the politics section of The Jargon File, in describing what is taken for the prevailing political leanings of hackers, we find:

Formerly vaguely liberal-moderate, more recently moderate-to- neoconservative (hackers too were affected by the collapse of social­ ism). There is a strong libertarian contingent which rejects conven­ tional left-right politics entirely. The only safe generalization is that hackers tend to be rather anti-authoritarian; thus, both paleoconser- vatism and 'hard' leftism are rare. Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to either (a) be aggressively apolitical or (b) enter­ tain peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day.403

While formally apolitical in statement, this passage is clearly quite political to the extent that the principle of anti-authoritarianism is given a universal char­ acter without providing any critical discussion of the nature of authoritarianism beyond a de facto equivocation of far left and far right ideologies, which are again, left unexamined. Nonetheless, what we are left with is a somewhat vague notion of hacker communities being comprised of strident individualists. In fact the theme of individualism is perhaps the most obviously common thread linking most contemporary discussions of hacker and FOSS cultures. With respect to his creative class, Florida has hypothesized, quite insightfully, that individuality is "a hallmark of creative work", and that this obtains due to the fact that creativity is developed by, and contingent upon, the individual exercising her own judgment

- an intrinsic feature of creative labour.404 Labouring creatively then serves as

279 an iterative process of individuation for the worker. Yet with respect to hack­ ers in particular, there seems to be some basis for assuming that people seeking out the hacker community already have strongly preformed individual identities.

Hackers are interested in technological innovation, and this process is by nature esoteric and alienating from a technological standpoint for many people. Tor­ valds' claim that the computer is entertainment for the hacker points towards a individual disposition towards technology that strays from the predominant social disposition. In fact, the upsurge in FOSS' popularity, its ongoing incor­ poration into corporate IT strategies, and therefore its efficacy as a substitute for gaining experience via paid employment, has led to some speculation that while the FOSS initiative, along with many new technology initiatives, originally drew anti-authoritarian, non-conformist youth to their ranks this creatively vi­ brant demographic is increasingly more likely to shun it and head elsewhere.405

There are a couple of things to take away from this suggestion: First, inasmuch as hacker and FOSS communities might to some extent influence their members' consciousnesses, they also seem to attract a certain kind of person in the first place. Second, as FOSS has matured, presuming that there is any dominant mo­ tivation for contribution, becomes increasingly less tenable. According to a 2002

EU survey of FLOSS contributors 53.2% of contributors identified social motiva-

280 tions as the prime motivator, 31.4% cited career or monetary motivations, 12.7% cited political motivations, and 2.6% cited software functionality motivations.406

It is imperative to stress that this sort of motivational shift does not neces­ sarily undo any sort of previous antagonism to capitalism that may have existed within the FOSS community and/or among hackers. The percieved roguish char­ acter of hackers has lead many to presume that hackers, and by extension the

FOSS community, are oppositionally located relative the logic of capital, though this presumption cannot (and really could never) be maintained. What this shift represents is the onset of an increasingly instrumental approach to technology within the FOSS community which stands at odds with the hacker disposition to technology. This antagonism breaks down to the counterposing of determinate and non-determinate technological prespectives, which, while the former is sin­ gular, the latter are necessarily multiple (i.e. is not determined). What is critical to bear in mind then, is that the content of the hacker disposition to technology need not be normatively homogenous, and in fact, and in keeping with Raymond's characterization, has tended, if anything, to articulate itself as a highly stylized exageration of the logic of capital. To this point, it seems pertinent to note that the IT sector, in which many FOSS contributors and hackers are located, is rel­ atively resistant to unionization. As Dyer-Witheford has pointed out, organized

281 labour has made some inroads in the IT sector, but mainly in the peripheral, though still vital in terms of the sector's proper functioning, low pay, low skill, service occupations (what Florida identifies as the creative periphery).407 While there have been concerted efforts undertaken to organize creative/IT workers at the core of the IT industry (notably through the efforts of the Communications

Workers of America), these efforts have been impeded in part by the structure of the IT industry, which is comprised of a massive diversity of occupational cate­ gories, but more fundamentally, by resistance from the workers themselves in the form of expressed antipathy towards unions.408 This antipathy can be attributed to three characteristics of the average American IT worker: First, unions are perceived as working class institutions, and IT professionals tend not to perceive themselves as members of the working class, or at least, not of the industrial working class with which unions remain associated. Second, unions and union­ ization are conflated with leftist ideological tendencies and rejected on ideological grounds as failed and/or fascist. Third, and closely related to the preceding point, there is a definite lone gunman quality to the character of many IT workers, and this conflicts with the perceived collectivistic tendencies of unions. Of course there is no exclusive relationship between unionization and an emerging working class consciousness, but as far as bellwethers go, this seems to be as good an

282 institutional indicator as there is that many of the people that might fall into the category hacker, are not inclined towards the explicit articulation of what we might consider an unalienated consciousness. Again, however, insisting that we need to find a (single) working class consciousness within agents of social trans­ formation is a theoretically untennable position. There is no basis on which to assume that political engagement follows from the exercise of a conscious will exhibiting a specific class orientation.

Raymond has noted that there are a number of well documented instances where hackers have turned activist - most notably in the organization of a con­ certed, and ultimately successful, effort to overturn the Clipper Proposal (which would have enabled the US federal government to circumvent encrypted com­ munications) in 1994 to 1995, and in 1996 with the successful overturn of the

Communications Decency Act (the language of which concerning the transmis­ sion of indecent and obscene material was criticized for limiting First Amendment rights).409 A slightly more recent example might be the legal battle, and direct action response to it, that erupted after the DeCSS program was released that enabled DVD playback on Linux platforms. Under the US Digital Millennium

Copyright Act (DMCA), distribution of the DeCSS code (which was readily avail­ able online) was prohibited, provoking many who interpreted the protection the

283 DMCA afforded intellectual property rights as dangerously expansive, and the enforcement mechanisms it implemented as unduly harsh, to distribute the code via a myriad of novel mediums (t-shirts, posters, poems, music, ...) both on and off-line. In general, these might all be considered examples of what has come be known as hacktivism, which Tim Jordan has roughly defined as the application of FOSS, cracking, and hacking techniques and cultures to a sphere of action be­ yond the immediately technological. Further, and as Jordan notes, the common trope connecting hacktivist actions, tends to be the promotion of openness and access, which is consistent with the examples provided above.410 This recurrent theme of openness and access is critical to understanding the ways in which even the overtly political activities of hacker communities are in some regard highly circumscribed.

While this cannot be considered an absolute and universal characterization of hacker communities, for the most part, the political discourse that has been built up around hackers, where there is one at all, is presented in terms of a largely neg­ ative rights framework. As suggested at the outset of this work, this inclination towards liberty framed in the negative corresponds with an fetishistic treatment of the communicative faculties of technology, and specifically IT and the net­ work form. In this regard, the IT revolution has tended to exhibit distinctly

284 libertarian inclinations (read, the American appropriation of liberal orthodoxy), espousing, to varying degrees, the highly idealized notion that networks dissolve governments, or more generally, the need for any kind of centralized authority.411

To some extent, this libertarian inclination among hackers is a markedly Ameri­ can phenomenon and in contrast, among European hacker communities, rhetoric often tends to evoke an anarchist thematic - though technique (the technical dimension of practice) remains largely consistent across both groups.412 While

Jordan has suggested that this may simply be a difference constrained to the level of rhetoric, this differentiation seems to carry over, more substantively, into the FOSS community inasmuch as European FOSS users, states, and companies tend mostly to be concerned with growing local development communities, estab­ lishing expertise, promoting single open licensing, capitalizing in non-direct ways, and avoiding vendor lock in, while their counterparts in the US tend mostly to be concerned with cost reduction, direct monetization, and promoting dual licensing models (ie. pecuniary, instrumental applications of FOSS).413 Put otherwise, Eu­ ropean FOSS communities tend to emphasize the social/community dimension of

FOSS, while American FOSS communities tend to emphasize the market dimen­ sion of FOSS. Notably, and bearing directly on the preceding observation, though

FOSS communities are technically able to be geographically disperse, overwhelm-

285 ingly contribution is concentrated in the US. When asked in an interview why this was the case, Raymond provided the following answer: Culture and capital. The U.S. combines several advantages that are hard to beat. One is that we have huge amounts of capital sloshing around looking for high-risk but high-gain investments, and histori­ cally computers and software have been capital-intensive industries. That era is gone now, done in by cheap PCs and the Internet, so some of the U.S.'s competitive advantages have gone with it. On the other hand, the U.S. has cultural traits that are very good for incouraging [sic] "initiatives related to software" and that are harder to duplicate elsewhere. Part of the emotional engine that drives really creative programmers is a secret (or not-so-secret) belief that they're smarter than almost anyone else. A culture that smashes that kind of egotism in the cradle (like, say, Japan's) can produce many programmers that are skilled but few or none that are superbly talented and driven. The U.S., on the other hand, is more supportive of that kind of individualism than anywhere else in the world. Which is why Linus Torvalds lives here now.414

It is perhaps unfair to take Raymond's libertarian characterization of the

FOSS community and hackers as the final word for the entire community, but, though perhaps exaggerated, this is such a consistent thematic in most treat­ ments, that it appears to hold. Weber's characterization of the Open Source ethic for instance is broken into three components: libertarian reverie, perfect meritocracy, and Utopian gift culture.415 Himanen suggests that a Hacker Ethic is in the process of unseating (or at least challenging) the established Protestant

Work Ethic, and integral to this Hacker Ethic is the Network Ethic (the Nethic), which reflects the core values of hackers: privacy, freedom of expression, and self-

286 activity.416 However, Himanen's inclusion of self-activity, which is concerned with emphasis placed on "the realization of a person's passion instead of encouraging a person to be just a passive receiver in life,"417 within the Nethic, along side the more traditionally liberal principles of privacy and freedom of expression, points towards a conflict within the Hacker Ethic that prevents its simple reduction to doctrinaire libertarianism (as Raymond is prone to do), and begins to explain how it is that this group of rabid individuals is so able to organize itself into communities that are able to achieve tremendous levels of productivity and even political efficacy. Self-activity is in fact simply an alternate way of speaking of unalienated labour, and in this case, what matters is that the passions that a person seeks to fulfill through their activity, are authentically their own. What is critical then in considering hackers is how the satisfaction of desire is linked to technology.

As noted earlier, one of Torvalds' three defining criteria in his model for hacker motivations is that computers (which we may roughly rephrase here as technology in general) are experienced as entertainment in and of themselves. The satisfac­ tion of desire then for hackers hinges on their ability to autonomously use the technology of their choosing. To reflect on Jordan's central thesis, hackers resist technological determination in a effort to become technologically determining.

287 The satisfaction of desire then lies in the process of overcoming technological de­ termination. However, in the theorization of the hacker-technology interaction, technology is routinely treated in its particular concrete form - a computer, a cellular phone, a radio, a hammer - and not in its social abstract form, as a prin­ ciple of order and rationality. Particular concrete manifestations of technology exhibit a functional character in their determination - they exist to perform as means according to constraining criteria and with respect to predetermined ends, and it is at the level of pure functionality that the egoistic fulfillment of desire

(which is not necessarily identical to the fulfillment of desire in general) may be reconciled with collective action.418 This is in some sense analogous to Habermas' ideal speech situation, and is therefore succeptible to the same critique that the ethical and political content of the context (i.e. technology) must come to bear on the activities of the agents operating within it, and moreover, the determi­ nation of the context necessarily constrains the horizon of achievable outcomes.

To speak of resisting technological determination then insists that we consider at what level of determination we conceptualize technology.

The definition of hacker set out eariler in this section aims at being as inclu­ sive as possible while still remaining historically relevant. To this end, beyond the purely technical requirements obtaining to hacking, only a small disposi-

288 tional residuum is included within the definition, specifying that the technical practice is, broadly considered, unconventional in some regard. This definition emphasizes how the individual interacts with technology, and makes no ethical claim on the hack itself, the intent motivating it, or its outcome. Definitions which exceed this minimum progressively impose a specific functional character on the hacker which corresponds with the level at which technology is conceptu­ alized, and therefore understood as determined. The hacker-cracker distinction reflects this functionalization to the extent that inasmuch as the ends sought by crackers might be considered bad these ends are generally considered beyond eth­ ical evaluation (i.e. they are bad because they are dysfunctional with respect to some prescribed legitimate end). In Raymond's distinction of hackers from crack­ ers, this ethical judgement (which remains the primary distinguishing mark) is backed by a technical argument in which technical capabilities of crackers are im­ pugned.419 However, this sort of technical distinction seems weak given the way in which it potentially subordinates enthusiasm and creativity (predominantly noted trtaits of the hacker) to expertise, and moreover for the fact that some cracks undoubtedly do exhibit a high degree of expertise.

This sort of functionalization of the hacker identity is in fact a determina­ tion that may be understood as a derivative of the functional determination of

289 technology. Generally speaking, the legitimacy of any given technology is deter­ mined with respect to its function, and the processes of technological innovation largely lie outside of the democratic purview. This exclusion is taken for a le­ gitimate expedience in the process of innovation, as it is difficult to rationalize how non-technical people should be allowed to have a say on matters of tech­ nology. Concerns over the emergence of a democratic deficit in the process of technological innovation then are dismissed on the grounds that inasmuch as efficiency is granted the ethical status of good, then so long as the process at­ tains efficiency internally (through exclusion, and operationalization in technical terms), and produces efficiency externally (with respect to predetermined ends), the process itself is good.420 The onus then that is placed on those engaged in the processes of technological innovation is to determine technology at the proclaimed or presumed ethically barren level of functionality. This rejection of ethical con­ tent, however, is in fact pantomime denying the social reproductive function, and therefore political content, of the technological apparatus of society. The ethi­ cal argument of the FS movement, as opposed to its OSS successor, represented a (minor) breach of this logic, and in doing so threatened to push forth a new definition of hacker, and perhaps even technology. Reflecting this, in some of the most lucid moments in discussions revolving around the GPL, the GPL itself

290 has been characterized as a hack, and perhaps Stallman's most important hack.

Indeed, the GPL (in all of its versions) is a hack. Inasmuch as the GPL becomes associated with particular concrete technological forms, what it takes aim at is the abstract social form of technology, and in doing so, attempts to resist (if only in a small way) technological determination at this level. What Stallman attempted to do was to shift the ethical framework for the production of software, and to facilitate this, he linked this ethical argument to a set of functional and pragmatic arguments that would appeal to a wide base of programmers.421 The fact of the matter is, however, that though Free Software may be more relevant now than ever, its profile has been largely eclipsed by that of the Open Source movement, and in this condition "[p]ragmatism rules and the metric for success is now clearly laid down - it is about conquering the "market" by building software and software packages that meet the needs of users better than any alternatives.

In short, a new production process with a very standard measure of achievement was established."422 Yet Free Software persists, and the GPL remains the most popular family of licenses. Reflecting on this situation, Stallman has remarked:

Some try to disparage the free software movement by comparing our disagreement with open source to the disagreements of those rad­ ical groups. They have it backwards. We disagree with the open source camp on the basic goals and values, but their views and ours lead in many cases to the same practical behavior - such as developing free software.

291 As a result, people from the free software movement and the open source camp often work together on practical projects such as soft­ ware development. It is remarkable that such different philosophical views can so often motivate different people to participate in the same projects. Nonetheless, these views are very different, and there are situations where they lead to very different actions.423

In concluding the piece quoted above, Stallman makes the following, very astute, observation:

The practices that don't uphold freedom and the words that don't talk about freedom go hand in hand, each promoting the other. To overcome this tendency, we need more, not less, talk about freedom.424

To reiterate, Richard Stallman is no communist, or anti-capitalist radical of any kind. What he locks into in these statements though is the existence of a powerful rhetoric of private property that reduces technology to a purely functional and determined thing, and that simultaneously limits substantively the sphere of human freedom. Nevertheless, the appearance of freedom is granted to this rhetoric inasmuch as an activity of autonomous technological innovation may be carried out along functional lines. In this ethical liquidation open becomes synonymous with free.

Though the contours of Negri's intellectual subject might be more readily apprehended among European hacker communities, overall, the political inclina­ tions of the community as a whole are far less class conscious than Negri supposes

292 might be the case. It is for this reason that in taking an early glance at the FOSS phenomenon DeLanda saw the Free Software subgroup as being a more hopeful source of political agitation.425 Yet, as Aronowitz has pointed out, the right lib­ ertarian critique of civil society has been more effective than that issued from the left in recent years, and the reflection of this in the FOSS community manifests as the dominance of the Open Source concept over the Free Software alterna­ tive. Crucially, however, Aronowitz points out that despite its simple parroting of prevailing capitalist logic (only in exaggerated - or perhaps simply less ob­ fuscated terms), the libertarian critique is still a positive indication of growing dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs.426 In a similar vein Negri notes that inasmuch as the 20th century was marked by the persistent rejigging of the mechanisms of capitalism with the net effect of ultimately resorting to a ne- oliberal project which attenuated economic and political disparities between the levels of theory, rhetoric, and reality, this process of perpetual reform has sparked growing resistance from both the left and the right.427 This process of perpetual reform now manifest as deregulation ends up placing the socialized worker at its centre according to Negri, and I would add that the technological dimension of this process (connected to the infrastructure enabling the highly mediatized, transnational, real-time, precision functioning of multinational capital) locates

293 hackers even more centrally.428 Under this condition, the potential impact that

hackers are able to make on the technological apparatus of capitalism is height­

ened, though the ascendence of a libertarian ethos among hacker communities

and the functionalization of hackers and technology militates against such a po­ tentiality expressing itself as an artifact of working class consciousness. This class antagonistic articulation of identity is consitent with the understanding of class set out in the preceding material, and on that count is expected, but more impor­ tantly, the absence of a consistent working class consciousness does not foreclose on the appearance of rupturous phenomena emanating from hacker communities.

As IT has becomes tightly integrated into more aspects of everyday life, be­ come common place, a tension emerges between a coUectivistic impulse and a libertarian impulse. The coUectivistic tendency is related to the popularization of the Internet, and with this, the onslaught of technically non-capable persons into the technological sphere, whereas the libertarian ethic asserts itself in the frontier attitude of early adopters and serious users, who are largely responsible for the development of the technological apparatus as a whole, but find the mid­ dling tendency of its popular appropriation uninteresting and unwelcoming.429

Simultaneously, in the sphere of capital connected to the production of the tech­ nological apparatus of capitalism, the highly valued workers that drive forward

294 the processes of production, which are frequently identical to the processes of technological innovation, find their mode of work, and the nature of their prod­ uct, at odds with the traditional mode of managerial labour discipline. This in mind, Aronowitz has suggested that under the conditions of late capitalism the distinguishing feature of the working class is increasingly not its relationship to the means of production, but its position within the labour process.430 Even so, ownership, or at least control, over the means of production is in fact in question to the extent that this is increasingly a question over what constitutes, and who controls, intellectual property. In the libertarian framing of this conflict what is at stake is the balance of power within a system of private property - it is, as Weber suggests, a distributional matter.431 Regardless, it remains conflictual.

But again, the conflict is not expressed in terms of class (at least not for hackers inclining to libertarianism). Rather, it is expressed in terms of being an indi­ vidual conflict. But it is a conflict that is in part a product of the collectivized labour of these individuals, enabled by the functionalization of technology and the hacker identity. It is this functionalization that additionally serves the mass appropriation of technology, its popularization, and the emergence of mass tech­ nology, which posits itself as a middling tendency which repels those whose desire is linked to overcoming the banal technological appropriations of everyday life, or

295 who enjoy the capacity accruing from the even the slightest advantage in techno­ logical know-how of being able to exploit relative technological naivete. This may be the continued expression of an alienated consciousness, but in its situation at the productive core of capitalism, in its far ranging reach, and in its individual­ ized articulation, it is violent in character. Though it is difficult to conceptualize hackers as an imminent proletarian power, inasmuch as we might be tempted to cast most hackers into the alienated ranks of the working class, or cast them as the functionaries of the bourgeoisie, doing so ignores how the actions emanating from hackers are able to assume antagonistic positions relative to the overarching technological apparatus of capitalism.

4.2.1 The Destructive Character

Reflecting on Andre Gorz's work, Deleuze and Guattari remark that "[although

[the scientific and technical worker] has mastered a flow of knowledge, informa­ tion, and training, he is so absorbed by capital that the reflux of organized, axio- mated stupidity coincides with him, so that, when he goes home in the evening, he rediscovers his little desiring-machines by tinkering with a television set ... Of course the scientist as such has no revolutionary potential; he is the first inte­ grated agent of integration, a refuge for bad conscience, and the forced destroyer

296 of his own creativity." This remains a gloomy perspective because inasmuch as

the scientist rediscovers his desiring-machines away from work, this is also a space

away from political efficacy. The expression of desire which might constitute a

new line of flight is reigned in from the outset. This situation is altered under

the condition brought about via the rapid spread of IT where the technological

dimension of the private sphere is increasingly permeable and individual fasci­

nation is functionally reconcilable with social infatuation. As such, and this is

perhaps an appealing definition to consider, the hacker appears as a technologi­

cally differentiated individual among a technologically undifferentiated mass.433

This portrait of the hacker, as the enabler of a massification against which

their identity is articulated, is actually a fairly readily apprehended feature of

advanced capitalism - though its treatment is often left lacking. This is in some

respect the modern manifestation of Benjamin's flaneur.434 Florida has suggested

that the members of his creative class exhibits the characteristics of the flaneur,

inasmuch as Florida argues that life among the crowd grants a quasi-anonymity that affords the assertion of a stronger sense of self - an assertion that is stimu­

lated by diversity and conflict inherent to the urban scene.435 However, Florida's characterization of the flaneur is almost entirely passive, whereas the flaneur

Benjamin finds in Baudelaire is not. Florida's flaneur is reduced to an individual

297 afforded personal expression by the indifference of a crowd which is fundamentally rooted in it being ascribed a liberal character. This condition seems more akin to the crowd that Benjamin apprehends in Baudelaire's translation of Poe's descrip­ tion of the London crowd - a crowd that militates against the flaneur, ultimately robbing him of his distinctive composure.436 Rather, inasmuch as the flaneur is a gentleman of leisure whose pleasure accrues in part from his ambulation among the crowd, the crowd is that of the Parisian Arcades in which the rules of modern urban life have not fully subsumed the populace, and his ambulation takes on a somewhat pugilistic character. The flaneur is not fully subsumed in the logic of the city, this is his luxury and his pleasure, and by extension his individua­ tion accrues from an underlying antagonism he holds towards the crowd. In his antagonism the flaneur affirms the mass character of the crowd, constitutes the crowd, yet this constitutive act is only relevant insomuch as it is synonymous with his constitution of his own individuated self. The relationship the flaneur shares with the crowd then is neither benevolent nor malevolent ... it is ambiva­ lent - simultaneously a simple personal pleasure and an unceasing revulsion, its outward expression is a smile that is both welcoming and arrogant.

Hackers are flaneur then only insomuch as their location within the technolog­ ical structure of capitalism allows them to elude total technological subsumption

298 to some degree. Moreover, the dually-constituting antagonism they share with

the technological mass manifests itself as an ongoing claim against their techno­

logical enframing. Just as the principal activity of the flaneur is his (antagonistic)

ambulation, the hacker, as a reappearance of the artisan, is an ambulant worker,

in Deleuze and Guattari's terms. Existing along side the machinery of the state

which violently attempts to impose its axiomatic, the ambulant worker is inti­ mately acquainted with the workings of the machine, and this knowledge enables their limited separation from it. In this freedom the ambulant worker imposes forms rather than following those established in the axiomatic.437 Considering hackers and FOSS, this imposing of forms appears most obviously in the creation of new software, and programming techniques, but also appears in the challenge that these practices issue to the established logic of capitalism. Lawrence Lessig has suggested that (software) code is in fact analogous to law, as code, like law, may enable and disable freedoms. However, as Lessig points out, this analogy is increasingly an equivalence as the exuberance of Western intellectual property rights law (and specifically the DMCA) increasingly attempt to apply itself to every potentiality of the code. As such, the practices that resist this kind of closing of code also increasingly resist the closing of intellectual property rights law on civil society.438 Ultimately Lessig's conclusion settles on a sort of middle-

299 of-the-road reformist approach to property rights (advocating, like Weber and

Benkler, a dualized model in which the treatment of some intellectual property as commons enriches the principle of private property), but his claim that the legal and political discourse can be pushed forward by technique at the bound­ aries of the law is an important one. Lessig's characterization of the interaction between the practice of coding and law is that of a negotiation, and indeed, if we consider the GPL, which uses the principles of established intellectual property rights to subvert their use for the privatization of intellectual property, this sort of interaction is immediately apparent. However, there is another dimension to the interaction between the practices of hacking and law, and that lies in the absolute breach of the law.

In considering where resistance might emerge from in his Society of the Spec­ tacle, Debord asserts that the new struggle which could emerge - pitted against organized labour and capital alike - would be associated with a younger genera­ tion, and proceed under the banner of criminality. At the head of this movement would be a new General Ludd.439 The inclusion of a reference to Luddism seems a contradictory notion here,- but it is easily made sense of if we consider the dialectical form of technology. Just as Ludd, and his followers', anger was not directed towards technology in general but towards its particular integration into

300 the emerging industrial labour process, the hacker too expresses a displeasure with technology in its determined form. In the interaction of escalating social need and technological capacity, this displeasure manifests variously as hacking, and cracking. The Mentor's manifesto is ostensibly a plea to reconsider the le­ gal status of the activities which constitute hacking - which in its infancy nearly necessitated illegality due to the fact that the vital experimental resources that fascinated would be hackers were for the most part privately owned by capital and the state. In a statement that to some extent predicts The Mentor's sentiment,

Stallman states:

Many programmers are unhappy about the commercialization of system software. It may enable them to make more money, but it requires them to feel in conflict with other programmers in gen­ eral rather than feel as comrades. The fundamental act of friendship among programmers is the sharing of programs; marketing arrange­ ments now typically used essentially forbid programmers to treat oth­ ers as friends. The purchaser of software must choose between friend­ ship and obeying the law. Naturally, many decide that friendship is more important. But those who believe in law often do not feel at ease with either choice. They become cynical and think that programming is just a way of making money.440

Stallman apprehends a fractious tendency in the privatization of software that threatens to undermine a nascent community of hackers, and increasingly this ten­ dency expresses itself as a trade-off between community and legality. Critically, the refinement of the discourse around intellectual property rights has reframed

301 this concern. The exercise of increasingly stiff penalties and a heightened aware­

ness of the readiness of capital and the state to litigate around matters of intel­

lectual property has concretized the notion of immaterial property and in doing

so attenuated the degree of illegality involved in such a trade-off. As Foucault suggests, the concept of criminality possesses a dual character: On the one hand, it provokes sympathy from those that see some degree of injustice in the system.

On the other hand, it provokes contempt because crime is conceptualized as being committed against a system of which all members of society are a a part, and as such, all experience victimization personally.441 The sense of injustice experienced by hackers and the relative lack of extensive legal repercussions early on (at least for the lesser crime of copyright violation) made forays into illegality a less press­ ing matter than they are today. However, with the escalating importance of IT, and the people who create it, to the accumulative apparatus of capitalism, the criminal character of such acts was strengthened. In pursuing this path, capital and the state threatened to alienate the very people at the heart of this vital process, and in some regard, FOSS offered up a way out of this bind. Once the less volatile concept of openness had been substituted for freedom, FOSS came to function as a sandbox in which hackers could exist largely without threatening the integrity of capitalist technology. This development undercuts the potential

302 for the development of a sympathetic perspective for the criminal, as the matter

of legality is no longer considered to be up for discussion for many. Those that

remain in the sandbox and conform to the norms of technological innovation as

prescribed by capital enter into a process of ascending individuation (as there is less dissonance between the subjective power and subjective experience because the individual exists within the fold and contributes to the shape of the disci­ plinary power), making relative gains within an economy of punishment. Those that are outside of the sandbox - crackers - enter into a process of descending individuation, which in their rejection of the logic of capital, their ostensible irrationality, gives them the appearance of madness, thereby legitimating their increasingly fierce subjugation.442

The escalation of the relative starkness of the hacker-cracker distinction re­ flects the development of this disciplinary rationality to some degree, and can be linked to the ongoing dismantling of an explicit class discourse - and by ex­ tension, a coherent working class consciousness among hackers. This discourse is reinforced by the accumulation of cultural capital, and then ultimately by real material pay-offs in the form of relatively high wages, employment security, and semi or pseudo-autonomy within the labour process. To the extent that hack­ ing can be considered artisanal, possessing a craft-like quality, or an aesthetic

303 dimension, under these conditions a considerable amount of both hacking and cracking (if we are to maintain the de facto distinction) can be interpreted as repressive desublimation. The hacker who contributes to a FOSS project in order to gain experience that can be parlayed into paid work, the hacker that willfully interprets free as implying authoritarianism, and the cracker who writes exploits for the purpose of selling exploited networks to SPAM distributors and/or par­ ties engaged in dubious online activities, all exhibit the formal qualities of being hackers, yet are ultimately subsumed by an instrumental rationality. The clearest articulation of this is probably Raymond's appropriation of Nietzsche and Ayn

Rand's works for the purpose of constructing selfishness as a virtue.443 (The ap­ propriation of the former is shallow, and the appropriation of the latter is simply an unfortunate confirmation of the shallowness of the former.) Rather, as Mar­ cuse suggests, it is not selfishness that points the way to a form of non-repressive mode of sublimation, but rather narcissism, but only insomuch as the narcissistic discovery of self entails the revealing of a self that inheres a oneness with the universe.

[B]eyond all immature autoeroticism, narcissism denotes a fun­ damental relatedness to reality which may generate a comprehensive existential order. In other words, narcissism may contain a germ of a different reality principle: the libidinal cathexis of the ego (one's own body) may become the source and reservoir for a new libidinal cathexis of the objective world - transforming this world into a new

304 mode of being.444

Marcuse's narcissism (via Freud via Marx) captures the emancipatory coun­

terpart to the principle of selfishness. What matters here though is the central

position that the ego takes in both of these principles, as the attenuation of the

ego appears to be the mark of labour residing at the core of the accumulative

apparatus of capitalism. However, though Raymond posits (or at least promotes)

selfishness, to suggest that the actions of hackers conform to either one principle

or the other would imply a consistency in character that is probably unattain­

able for any person. Rather, if we were to take a longitudinal look at the work of any given individual in this group, we would likely find a mixture of activities marked variously by their selfish and narcissistic characters. In this regard, the hacker is something of a chimera (as indeed many categories of people are in the context of advanced capitalism), engaging at one moment in emancipatory ac­ tivities, at another, in repressive activities, and never with a consciousness that need speak to the actual identity of either category of action. This is in fact, a sort of (anti)social archetype that has already been introduced by Benjamin under the moniker of The Destructive Character.

Benjamin's The Destructive Character is extremely brief, composed princi­ pally of short descriptives of what constitutes the destructive character, with no

305 material devoted to providing additional discussion. It is for this reason, a dif­

ficult piece to feel comfortable in, and perhaps this is by design. Nonetheless,

what stands out immediately as being particularly relevant to the discussion here

are the following remarks from Benjamin:

... the only work the [the destructive character] avoids is being creative. Just as the creator seeks solitude, the destroyer must be constantly surrounded by people, witness to his efficacy445

***

The destructive character stands in the front line of the tradition­ alists. Some pass things down to posterity, by making them untouch­ able and thus conserving them, others pass on situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them. The latter are called the destructive.446

***

Because [the destructive character] sees ways everywhere, he al­ ways positions himself at crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble, not for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.447

The first thing that is immediately apparent in this short work is the complete absence of any ethical dimension to the destructive character. Rather, what is treated as central is action. The crucial aspect of action here, however, is that it is simultaneously externally and internally motivated. Externally inasmuch as it demands an audience, crowd, and mass, and internally inasmuch as the destructive character is practice oriented, acting for the purpose of overcoming.

306 Moreover, it is practice - the capacity for continued action - that the destruc­ tive character produces and leaves as its historical artifact.448 It is never clear whether the destructive character is an enviable or unenviable person or quality.

It is more likely that it is neither. Its chimeric quality arises from the conflict that the destructive character encounters in its simultaneous dependence on the mass and its desire for ego differentiation. Each of these tendencies may be ar­ ticulated in repressive and emancipatory modes, and this is precisely why the destructive character is not historically conservative - it is historically transfor­ mative, but there is no inherent ethical determination in this transformation. In this regard, the destructive character is ambivalently situated relative to the tech­ nological apparatus of capitalism, appearing always as the menacing potentiality of technological overcoming.

Benjamin's characterization of the destructive character provides a critical insight into the nature of class under advanced capitalism, and especially among those groups of people, who though they may be considered working class in terms of a broadly conceived macro level structural analysis, resist any such categoriza­ tion in terms of their immediately apparent economic situation, and expressed identity. Crucially, the systemic affordances which enable this resistance also entail a development of an antagonistic sense of self, though the object of this

307 antagonism is likely noncontiguous. Thus, when we consider class, we must con­ sider the objective fact of class inherent in the structural logic of capitalism in interaction with the concept of class as apprehended by the individual ego. The relative continuity of this interaction then corresponds with the degree to which the individual ego is subsumed by the structural logic of capitalism (i.e. has become one-dimensional). The less subsumed the individual ego is, the more likely it is to encounter a dissonance between its expectations and reality.449 For

Negri, this dissonant condition intensifies in late 20*ft century capitalism, as the mismatch between the dogmatic uptake of neoclassical economic theory and its attempted practical application increasingly come into conflict.450 But this dis­ sonance is not the catalyst for class formation per se. Rather it is the source of individuated action which is the manifestation of personal desire pitted against socially prescribed happiness. The fact that the latter ultimately serves in the service of the reproduction of a class structure asserts that this is in fact class struggle.

This presentation of class struggle hinges on the understanding that, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, repression is not a constant, but rather a "coefficient of affinity" that exists between social machines and desiring machines that varies with the degree to which they share similar regimes.451 This inconstancy in re-

308 pression undermines the easy structuralization of class, yet creates the conditions

for action, initiated by small groups or individuals, that resists dominant social

determinations.452 This is the underlying class mechanic of technological rup­

ture, and is particularly important in the consideration of hackers due to the

relationship they share with the technological apparatus of capital accumulation

and knowledge and information production. Hackers, may or may not understand

themselves in classed terms, but their fairly immediate connection to the technos-

tructure of capitalism grants them a greater capacity for their individual actions

to a.) escape the valence of technological rationality (at least temporarily), and

b.) disperse more broadly. Given that there is no requirement put in place for the emergence of a coherent class consciousness from this perspective, inasmuch

as this might be considered a limit to capitalism depends on maximizing the rate and dispersion of these ruptures.

4.3 Hackers, FOSS, Networks - Radical and Repressive

Inasmuch as a good deal of the preceding material is focused on building a sub­ stantive understanding of hackers, this process is marked by a potential am- biguation to the extent that the definitional boundaries separating hackers from crackers are progressively collapsed. This potential conflation, which exists as a

309 byproduct of an initial simplification of the definition of hacker, corresponds with

the ongoing argument that the development of capitalist technology is marked by

an iterative process of potentially disruptive technologies being integrated into

the capitalist axiomatic. (Just as the transgressive technologies of yesterday may

become the functional technologies of today, so too might yesterday's cracker be­

come today's hacker.)It is the obverse of this principle which glibly summarizes

the relationship between technology and praxis. Though many self-proclaimed

hackers might vehemently object to the inclusion of crackers among their ranks,

as The Mentor's manifesto suggests, there was a time when the level of techno­ logical mastery hackers possessed was understood in terms of being a credible

threat to society.453 The categorical separation of hacker and cracker, which has evolved almost in step with the redefinition of free as open, masks this original aspect of the hacker identity, though to some extent, some sense of illicitness has been retained.454 This should not be taken as implying that crackers are in some way plugged in to a political dimension of hacking that hackers are not. They are not. However, whereas hackers tend to construct their identity in terms of a creative process of adding onto the human artifice, making them homo faber in Arendt's social scheme, the cracker constructs her identity in terms of being a transgressor of hacking, deconstructing and repurposing technologies.455 There

310 is a lot of conceptual bleed here, and it is likely that many hackers would object to the creative-destructive delineation between hackers and crackers. This is un­ doubtedly true, and as such, speaks to the substantive overlap that continues to persist between these two groups.

The hacker-cracker delineation that is generally preferred by hackers tends to correspond to the legal status of the activity in question, and this again speaks to the way in which hackers have internalized the prevailing technological rational­ ity. If we understand the activities of hacking and cracking as violent in character, as I have suggested earlier, then what we are in fact looking at are two distinct forms of violence that characterize particular cases of both activities: The first, in agreement with the prevailing technological rationality, is the individuated re­ action to the mythic violence of the state which imposes the formal legal form of the capitalist axiomatic, and as such the reaction unquestioningly accepts the ends established via technological rationality as its own telos. The second, an­ tagonistic to the prevailing technological rationality, is unalloyed violence, which by virtue of its antistructural nature, is not circumscribed with power.456 I speak of violence here because in both cases the activities of hacking and cracking tend to be explained in terms of the particular product of an agitated ego as opposed to the collective activity of a transcendent political will. What matters most to

311 this distinction though is that while mythic technological violence apprehends

technology in its particular concrete form, as a machine whose social usefulness

is predetermined, unalloyed technological violence apprehends technology in its

social abstract form, as a set of determinations that limit the usefulness of a ma­

chine. Neither of these distinctions maps exclusively to either of the categories

hacking or cracking, but to the extent that hackers are actively engaged in resist­

ing technological determination, then it is unalloyed technological violence that

most completely corresponds with the hack.

What is most notable about unalloyed violence though, is that because it is

not circumscribed by power, it is action for its own sake - as a means, it is its

own end. In this sense, hacking constitutes a sort of direct action, but in a highly

dematerialized, and often egoistic form.457 For these reasons, hacking is not rou­

tinely thought of in terms of a politically radical form of action (with the possible

exception of hacktivism, and increasingly high profile cyberwar initiatives, though

both remain fairly obscure in terms of developed political discourses), though it most certainly has the capacity to be exactly that. In some respect this stance

derives from Lessig's argument that the code for software, and particularly FOSS, is increasingly analogous to law. But what matters here, and what ultimately lies at the foundation of Lessig's thinking, is how software enables and restricts

312 action, and additionally, what the nature of this action is.

Consider the following statement made by Negri in light of the ongoing legal

battles over intellectual property rights: Every creation of a law by the state is, at the same time, the creation of its negation. ... It is no coincidence that the capitalist machine of the production of law is, at the same time and to the same degree, a machine which is organized for the solution of conflicts, i.e. one which is functionally organized for the reproduction of the capitalist state. The problem, then, is not one of new laws, but rather the tendency of the proletarian countervailing powers to concretize themselves and become hegemonic. The real problem is that of the collective demands that are beginning to be raised and which cannot be contained, save for brief periods, within juridical systems.458

Inasmuch as the ratcheting up of intellectual property rights law can be under­ stood as a response among developed countries to protect an increasingly critical category of economic activity, this legal action also established the foundation upon which subsequent legal conflicts would emerge. While Negri's suspicion that collective demands are emerging which cannot be contained might be overly optimistic, the underlying analysis is sound, and reflects the sort of technological rupture which is examined at the outset of this work. Though that opportunistic, and dissatisfied,459 subset of consumers coined pirates has tended to dominate the discourse over the practical application of intellectual property rights, hackers have played a central role in this conflict by actively developing the technology which both enables and curtails such illicit activities.460 While it is those hack-

313 ers who actively set out to confront technological determination that can most

honestly lay claim to the moniker hacker according to the perspective presented

here, the activity of hacking outside of this relatively small, and marginal group,

retains a radical potential to the extent that it creates functional objects that are open to multiple appropriations. As such, the activities of hackers enable practice in ways that might not otherwise have come into existence, and where these practices gain social momentum the possibility of practice presenting itself as a de facto assertion of a new law in contradiction to, and even in contravention of, de jure law established by the state, emerges.461

In its capacity to produce non-determined technological objects, FOSS is con­ stituted as a potential site for rupture. Here rupture exists only as potential due to the coexistence of repressive and radical tendencies within the contributing hacker community, the imminent antagonism endemic to the historically partic­ ular form of technology embedded in the process of history, and the conservative reflex of the capitalist axiomatic. There has been a tendency to apprehend a definite emancipatory vector within the FOSS community, but this apprehension derives largely from misreading an inherent reciprocity into the relationship be­ tween the formal expression of the labour process, and the consciousness of the labouring subject. While contributors espouse varying ideological outlooks, some

314 of which are inclined towards an emancipatory appropriation of FOSS, the notion that there is something inherently liberating in the labour of FOSS, something that confronts the alienated consciousness, is simply not a position that can be sustained as a general principle. The motive to contribute to FOSS, beyond ideological reasons, can as reasonably be framed in terms of instrumental ego gratification, as in terms of "socially recognized self-realisation."462 Such a pro­ cess of self-realisation is interpreted as generating a useful antagonism between the individuated experience of work at the intellectual centre of advanced capital­ ism, and the fundamental reality of a fully socialized apparatus of valorization.463

The fact of the matter, however, is that inasmuch as this antagonism has been encountered and recognized by hackers and other FOSS contributors, the artic­ ulation of an anti-capitalist consciousness has not generally emerged. Rather,

FOSS has in some regard become an effective means for containing the spread of just such a consciousness to the extent that FOSS increasingly expresses itself in capital friendly terms while allowing the activity of hacking to proceed along functional lines. This is the repressive function of FOSS.

The radical potential in FOSS derives from the fact that it is ultimately a technologically enabling phenomenon that produces the technological means and knowledge required for initiating subsequent forms of technological action.

315 In considering the socially transformative capacity of authors as producers of

creative works, Benjamin stated:

Nothing will be farther from the author who has reflected deeply on the conditions of present-day production than to expect, or de­ sire, such works. His work will never be merely work on products but always, at the same time, on the means of production. In other words: his products must have, over and above their character as works, an organizing function, and in no way must their organiza­ tional usefulness be confined to their value as propaganda. Their political tendency alone is not enough. ... What matters therefore is the exemplary character of production, which is first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers, that is, readers or spectators into collab­ orators.464

The direct application of this sentiment to the consideration of FOSS is im­ mediately apparent. Indeed, capital has appropriated FOSS as propaganda in its own interest (most obviously as a form of branding), and there is a case to be made that FOSS provides an organizing principle that addresses (albeit unsatis­ factorily in many regards) the troublesome matter of managing creative labour.

On the other hand, the most critical principle of FOSS is the assertion that the dichotomy of consumer-producer can, and must, be overcome, and to the extent that it (in many instances) is the manifestation of self-organized labour, it at the very least intimates the possibility of an alternate mode for organizing labour socially. What cannot be ensured, however, are the motives inspiring collabora-

316 tion, or the extent to which any of the positive demonstrative effects of FOSS will be seized upon by the individual. When Benjamin asserts there is a criti­ cal value in the exemplary character of production, he is focused on this positive demonstrative effect, just as Negri is. However, in considering FOSS, inasmuch as the character of production might be exemplary for its illuminating capacity, it is truly exemplary for the fact that it simply enables the further collapse of the consumer-producer dichotomy with respect to the ongoing development of the capitalist technological apparatus. It is this aspect of FOSS that presents the possibility for increasing the rate and dispersion of technological rupture founded upon the activities of hackers.

The final dimension to be considered where the radical possibilities of hackers and FOSS are concerned then is the organizational framework in which techno­ logical action, and technology are simultaneously situated and constitutive of; and now more than ever, this form is conceptualized in terms of being a network.

As noted in the first section of this work, one of the principle problems plaguing the discourse around networks is the tendency to read an inherent democratiz­ ing function into them. In some regard, there is a good reason to assert that such a function does in fact exist, as IT networks, inasmuch they have become increasingly important to the structure of society overall, facilitate an interactive

317 and/or multidirectional form of informational exchange (i.e. communication), as opposed to the static, unidirectional form of exchange facilitated by radio and television.465 This supplanting of mere information by communication does constitute a qualitative shift in the nature of the technological organization of society, and inasmuch as it may facilitate the development of radicalized, or at least less-alienated consciousnesses, this must be interpreted as a beneficial aspect of networks.466 Critically, this notion that IT networks can function as reactors developing unalienated consciousnesses seems to be a transcendent concept that is common to both liberal and radical network analyses (the former extending the postmaterialist perspective into the Information Society perspective, and the latter extending the post-scarcity perspective into the concept of the general in­ tellect). In both, it is the relative autonomy that networks provide, combined with their presumed identitarian diversity, that enables authentic (self-realizing) action on the part of the individual, that is taken up as the liberatory moment.467

The issue at hand here is that these claims regarding networks enabling and even encouraging autonomous identity formation, and ultimately action, essen­ tially conform to a typical pluralist perspective of social organization, and are likewise, susceptible to well established critiques of pluralism. Manuel Castells has suggested that the Internet has given rise to an oscillation between a tendency

318 towards social isolation (to the extent that virtual interaction supplants actual

interpersonal interaction) on the one hand, and a tendency towards social aggre­

gation (to the extent that virtual interaction facilitates more interactivity and is a

sufficient substitute for interpersonal interaction) on the the other. The outcome of this scenario is the emergence of many specialized virtual communities which provide emotional and informational resources for members, ultimately tending towards social aggregation - but an aggregation based on a relatively large num­ ber of weak bonds.468 At this point it should be noted that this pluralistic mode of social organization is identical to that which Florida suggests appeals most to his creative class.469 What Castells minimizes in his consideration, and what

Florida implicitly constructs as appealing to his creative class, is a near total lack of consideration for how power is distributed in any organizational form.

The caveat that networks should be structured around a maximal number of weak ties, attempts to theorize an absence of power into this model, but it is ul­ timately as untenable as the presumption of informational parity in markets, or more generally, the condition of perfect competition. Crucially, and very astutely,

Castells conceptualizes this network pluralism as the "privatization of sociabil­ ity" - the construction of social networks around the individual - and in doing so points back to the inescapable tension between the mass and the ego that seems

319 increasingly prevalent among sophisticated IT consumers and producers.470 The

pluralist perspective on networks prioritizes the ego driven, privatized dimension

here, from which sociability is secondarily derived, and in this regard, expresses

a logic that is essentially compatible with the principles of meritocracy, ego grat­

ification, and functional efficacy, with which the discussions of FOSS and hackers

are shot-through. Moreover, it theorizes networks as markets, and in doing so,

ideologically operationalizes the network. This operationalization is the expres­ sion and reproduction of a technological rationality that apprehends technology undialectically in the service of capital.

It is Foucault's examination of panoptic power that here stands as the strongest critique against the pluralist perspective on networks. In constructing the net­ work structure as a diversified equality the pluralist perspective obfuscates extant power relations; in doing so, resistance encountered by any individual in her ac­ tivities is interpreted as a function of personal merit and bad luck, rather than as the imposition of a structurally constituted disciplinary power. Moreover, in atomizing the concept of equality, via the linked concept of diversity, it falls to each individual network member to act as an arbiter of justice in instances where other individuals appear to be consolidating an inequitable share of power. In other words, the pluralist network automatically acts against subversive power,

320 but rarely in an obviously structural manner, and most frequently through the

distributed activities of its members who themselves exist as the objects of dis­

cipline.471 Moreover, the rhetoric of equality that pervades the pluralist notion

of networks, ultimately does not align with the reality of how IT, and the In­

ternet have developed. The fact of the matter is that the core infrastructure of

the Internet is not democratically owned or controlled, but lies in the hands of

a relatively small number of capitals. This is even more so the case if we con­

sider the technologies, and specifically software and hardware in the consumer

IT market, that enable mass connectivity.472 Additionally, states remain powerful

influences over how IT is deployed and used, and as such, have a direct impact on

how power is distributed in networks. The most apparent contemporary case is

probably the Chinese government's so-called great firewall, which is designed to

censor Internet content state wide. State level censorship of the Internet is in fact

a strategy that is growing in popularity, though it is frequently presumed that

it is a strategy particular to authoritarian regimes. (This has become a political

spark for certain hacktivist activities, and FOSS projects, most notably the TOR

network.) However, the previously mentioned Clipper proposal, and the FBI's

controversial (now defunct) Carnivore (a packet sniffer designed to intercept elec­ tronic communications) and (also defunct) Magic Lantern (key logging software

321 that could be installed via various exploits/cracks) projects, which originate in

the US, must be mentioned here as well. And of course, the ongoing legal actions

over software, music, film, and the piracy of electronically published media in

general, which sees large media publishing capitals, and their proxies, demanding

network data from Internet Service Providers which would enable punitive legal

action directed at particular individuals, also underscores the dual influence of capital and the state.

Inasmuch as networks might enable action, they also serve a repressive func­ tion, and in fact, the extent of repression that is achievable in a decentralized network structure is ostensibly greater than that achievable in a more central­ ized, or formally structured, configuration. However, what is crucial to note here is that in as much as this repressive capacity might originate in the interests of large scale actors, its logic is easily created iteratively at all levels of the network, and as Jo Freeman has noted: A 'laissez-faire' group is about as realistic as a 'laissez-faire' so­ ciety; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can easily be established because the idea of 'structurelessness' does not prevent the formation of informal structures, but only formal ones. ... Thus 'structurelessness' becomes a way of masking power...473

To some extent, this is a readily observed feature of large FOSS projects.

However, this process of informal structuring proves to be functionally useful in

322 these cases, and so criticizing it as unduly repressive is shortsighted. Rather,

what must be held subject to critique is the extent to which the concept of a

laissez-faire society has gained traction within the libertarian ethic of hackers.

With respect to the network form, there is a tendency within the libertarian

ethic to conceptualize networks as structureless, and therefore as creating the

ideal condition of absolute equality in opportunity. The more radical extension

of this manifests as a belief that the communicative capacity of networks will

eventually become a sufficient substitute for government.474 Defense of this po­

sition hinges upon a vulgar application of the principle of general equilibrium to

all aspects of sociability, despite the fact that the principle of general equilib­ rium is only tenable under highly reductive economistic terms that abstract from the complex realties of sociability. The modern update to this argument is that networks provide a new power to the individual that undermines asymmetrical power distributions endemic to socio-economic interactions.475 What in fact is being asserted here though is that networks, and specifically the Internet in this case, endow agents and their actions with a character which is more compatible with the economistic model for general equilibrium. In other words, the individ­ ual is converted into an abstraction, a virtual copy of herself, minus the qualities that make her an autonomous subject. This is in fact the repressive action of

323 capitalist technological rationality which in it most exaggerated form recasts au­ tonomy as the freedom of choice over the matter of how best to deny fulfillment of autonomous desire.

The repressive dimension of networks then is related to a more general re­ pressive tendency in technology, and particularly IT in the current historical context, to the extent that in its novelty, computer facilitated forms of action are privileged ahead of alternate forms of action. This is not to say that computer facilitated forms of action are ineffectual or inferior to alternate forms of action, but rather to warn against accepting a fetishized understanding of technology, which inheres a technocentrism in which authority is defined in functional terms, and at worst, reifies struggle in a dematerialized form.476 Without a linkage to the material conditions of existence, computer facilitated action will be nothing but performance without meaningful consequence. Crucially, this condition is satisfied (periodically) by the dialectical nature of technology itself, a fact which in and of itself strongly asserts the inherent value of the process of technologi­ cal innovation and particularly those practices, such as FOSS (along with many hacking and cracking activities), that transform the process itself. First, the en­ couraging of this sort of transformative practice then, and second, the creation and/or seeking out of spaces in which these practices will least be constrained by

324 a repressive technological rationality and/or the discipline of the network society,

become the foundational principles for initiating a radical form of technological action. The second of these principles, however, presents a massive obstacle to be overcome to the extent that it deals with the macro-structural nature of networks.

Inasmuch as networks are simply collections of interconnected nodes, there is no mutually exclusive linkage between the concept of network, and decentraliza­ tion. Nor is it likely that a sufficiently large and complex networked configuration will emerge, either centralized or decentralized, that is defined by perfectly sym­ metrical power relationships (which may be defined, at least in part, by the number of connections each node possesses, and the influence that each node has on other nodes in the network). To the extent that asymmetries in the power distribution may serve a repressive function, they may also enable unrepressed activity to the extent that a marginalized node on the network is weakly con­ nected to the most powerful elements of the network. This establishes a capacity for a greater range of action, and a greater possibility that the action will proceed without direct influence from the power centre, but it also establishes a relatively low probability that the action will propagate much further than the acting node itself, due to the marginal status of the acting node. Put simply, there is an inverse correlation between the capacity for action, and the probability of it suc-

325 cessfully manifesting as a substantive structural transformation. The strength of

this correlation is attenuated by the fact that credibly threatening actions will likely illicit a disciplinary response. What must come of radical action then is the capacity for more action, and in the context of a network form, this entails the creation of more radicalized nodes. This is by definition what Deleuze and

Guattari set out as the rhizomatic form. What is crucial about the rhizomatic form is that there is an inherent transient quality to it. In a rhizomatic con­ figuration individuals are interchangeable and definable only by their state in a given moment, and this is because the form itself is acentred and resists a sta­ ble configuration.477 Understanding the radical potentiality of networks in this fashion accounts for the interaction of an objective class structure with a highly fractured identitarian overlay, and makes no static claims on any individual or group. Radical action then appears as a perpetual, discontinuous activity at the margin, and this activity simultaneously promises the increasingly efficient re­ production of the network along side the possibility of its radical transformation.

True technological change then manifests as the miraculous success of marginal activities, and as unexpected technological atavism throughout the network as a whole.

326 5 Conclusion

This work has set out a theoretical framework for the development of an under­ standing of the nature of technology, and then subsequently applied this frame­ work to a discussion of the relative importance of FOSS and hackers to the contemporary reproductive and transformative processes of advanced capitalism.

Aside from its contemporaneous character, the decision to focus on FOSS speaks to the contradiction that it, as a practice, appears to generate within the estab­ lished logic of contemporary capitalism. These contradictions, and specifically those related to how FOSS forces a reconsideration of the nature of intellectual property rights, are significant, but the substantive depth of these contradictions, and capitalism's capacity for resolving conflicts emerging from them, must not be underestimated.

Where pure economic considerations are concerned, FOSS appears as a real threat to the production of value, and therefore the foundation of profit, for capi-

327 tals operating in the IT markets. This is true to a point, but does not constitute a

fundamentally crippling effect within capitalism per se. Understanding why this

is the case requires first, and most fundamentally, understanding how value pro­

duction proceeds in advanced stages of capitalism, and then how value is linked

to price. Value production under the conditions of advanced capitalism cannot be

conceptualized as an aggregation of the discrete activities of productive labour­

ers, as the productive apparatus has increasingly become socialized - meaning

that the apparently disparate labouring activities are in fact necessary precondi­

tions for each other. Under this condition, the distinction between unproductive

and productive labour becomes increasingly difficult, and in fact a potentially

unfruitful consideration, to the extent that value is, and always has been, rela-

tionally determined. What has changed in this advanced stage of capitalism is

the extent to which capitalist relations of production, have been both generalized

(to an ever larger portion of society) and (functionally) specialized. This is in

fact a tendency that can easily be abstracted from Marx's initial discussion of the

labour process, and specifically the development of both the social and detailed

division of labour, which ultimately culminates in his concept of the general intel­ lect.478 This does not deny an extant differential with respect to value production

among qualitatively different forms of labour, but rather suggests that how the

328 value-price transformation is carried out will vary from industry to industry, and

from one labouring activity to the next, depending on the relative import of each

within the total apparatus of accumulation.

The matter of price transformation has always been a difficult matter to

deal with in the Marxian framework, simply because it assumes the temporal

sensitivity of economic phenomena. However, the basic theoretical claims that

price is affected by the OCC, and by rent structures provides us with enough critical insight to begin to unravel the matter of how things are priced in a market, and to what extent capitals are susceptible to crises related to value production.479 Rent structures are particularly relevant to the discussion of FOSS, and software in general, as intellectual property rights essentially establish rents on informational commodities. This is in fact theoretically recognized in the tradition of neoclassical economics and has served as the impetus for suggesting that reform, to varying degrees, in this area is required. From the Marxian perspective, due to the assumption of a socialized apparatus of accumulation, regardless of whether or not there is a reform made to how intellectual property rights are designed, applied and enforced, what results from any shift in rent enabling conditions (which in this case FOSS represents) is a change in the social distribution of value, and this is reflected in the lesser or greater deviation of a

329 commodity's price from its value. This price fluctuation is then transmitted to

other capitals through the circuit of capital, with the ultimate effect of altering

the OCC, principally via a change in the cost of fixed capital, a matter that is

conceptually reflected in the decomposition of the OCC into the TCC and VCC.

Changes in the OCC do have a direct impact on value production, as set

out in the LTRPF, however the tendency of declining value production can be

counteracted by absolute increases in productive output, and by the productive

activity of new capitals which provide complements to cheapening commodities.

Thus, FOSS, inasmuch as it threatens to displace value in the commercial IT sec­

tor, also provides conditions for expanding productive activity in other sectors.

In this regard, though there are potential dissipations and displacements of value

that might be recognized in the FOSS phenomenon, these tendencies also entail

countertendencies which prevent interpreting FOSS as a potential hard limit to

capitalism. Moreover, though the wide-scale adoption of FOSS might entail the formal decommodification of software, to the extent that this is deemed an ac­ ceptable loss to capital as a whole, FOSS also produces a number of effects in the labour market which are also beneficial to capital.

Most general of these positive effects, and the effect that capital often seems most enthusiastic about, is the possibility that the FOSS community will eventu-

330 ally come to function as a sort of human resources adjunct to capitals operating in the IT sector. In this role, the FOSS community functions as a employment screening and skills development arena, and as such, resources dedicated to these functions might be off-loaded from the capitals in question.480 Additionally, the

FOSS community itself might restructure the social division of labour in the

IT sector such that basic frameworks or platforms are developed in the FOSS community, while customized, and commercializable, aspects of specific software offerings are developed within individual capitals. (The inverse of this also holds, where the framework or platform is developed in-house, and additional features are developed in the FOSS community.) In this case, FOSS enables a reduction in sunk labour costs, and potentially sunk fixed capital costs as well, while enabling the production of a commodity with a larger feature set. (This is value added, in business terms.) Stated flatly, FOSS holds the potential for realizing new modes of labour exploitation at potentially greater degrees.

However, inasmuch, as FOSS might be a potential boon to some capitals, it remains a potentially disruptive (though by no means terminal) phenomenon in economic terms. The disruptive capacity of FOSS derives, as noted here, from the potential shift it might facilitate within the social distribution of value, and additionally, though in what can only reasonably be expected to be the extremely

331 long term, from a heightened rate of exploitation among workers in the IT sector.

This disruptive capacity is worth considering with respect to the potential for socio-economic transformation, but must be understood as insufficient on its own.

Where the more acute threat to capital from FOSS lies is in the degree of relative autonomy that FOSS grants to its contributors in their labour with respect to the relative importance of this sort of labour to the reproductive process of capitalism.

This required heightened degree of autonomy derives from the creative nature of many of the types of labour associated with FOSS contribution, which resists

(though perhaps not entirely) the traditional tactics of management. This, com­ bined with the centrality of this type of labour within the capitalist apparatus of accumulation, has been theorized as providing the conditions necessary for this group of workers to develop a working class consciousness, or at least a conscious­ ness that would facilitate the emergence of a concerted class struggle. However, this perspective does not seem to align with the current rhetoric of the hacker, and

FOSS contributor communities. Although class conscious voices are not entirely absent from these communities, they are certainly a marginal subset, and the dominant rhetoric inclines towards a (right) libertarian ethic which is compatible with, and complimented by, a socially dominant identity politics discourse which explicitly denies the existence of class. In denying class, individuals are theo-

332 rized as a collection of formal charactersitics that describe functional capacitites, and in this regard the accepted logic of identity politics constitutes one aspect of the prevailing technological rationality which constructs every component of society as a means in service of a pregiven end - the perpetual reproduction of capitalism. This discourse of identity politics is reinforced by the lived experience of workers who continue to experience the consequnences of the application of neoliberal economic reform,481 and specifically the ways in which this reform has detemporalized and deterritorialized work - work becomes the omnipresent task of the individual, rather than a spatially and temporally constrained collective activity.

The internalization of this discourse results in many hackers viewing them­ selves and their activities as fundamentally apolitical - with the express exception that there is a stongly voiced sentiment directed against concepts that are taken as espousing left-wing, socialist, and/or coUectivistic tendencies. However, this supression of any political or ethical dimension in themselves or their activities, in fact brings hackers into conflict with the prevailing technological rationality which promotes a narrowly egoistic concept of self. Inasmuch as hackers hack in an effort to satisfy their own desires (i.e. find pleasure in the activity itself), the drive to satisfy desire contains within it the possibility of generating a out-

333 come that is, or becomes, antagonistic to the prevailing technological rationality, which is fundamentally concerned with the supression of autonomous desire.482

Moreover, this imminent antagonism may arise out of both the repressed (i.e. instrumentalized) and unrepressed (i.e. self-gratifying) practices hacking.

That a repressed action may give rise to an atagonism follows from the appli­ cation of a materialist understanding of technology, the fundamental principle of which is that the technological subject and the technological object exist within a continuous process of intermediation which necessiatates that technology con­ tains within it a permanent non-determinate character. The extent to which this nondetermination asserts itself is a function of how vigorously the prevailing tech­ nological rationality is applied to the practices of manufacture and use for any particular technology. Thus, the prevailing technological rationality supposes and promotes a highly particular concept of technology which masks, and attempts to suppress, the inherently conflictual character of technology in general. Where the disciplinary mechanisms of the prevailing technological rationality are weak­ ened, slip, or are subject to disruption, opportunities arise where the suppressed contradiction may manifest as a technological rupture, and this is precisely the sort of opportunity that is generated in the practice of hacking.

The importance of FOSS to this discussion then lies in FOSS' capacity to

334 enable the practice of hacking. Moreover, FOSS enables the practice of hacking

both in terms of its usefulness as a tool to hackers, and in terms of its usefulness

as a forum for skills development. As a tool, as a particular concrete mani­

festation of technology, every FOSS offering possesses the internally conflicted character of technology which establishes the possibility of technological rupture.

Because FOSS attempts to stimulate contribution via its openess, this raptur­ ous potential may in fact be heightened due to an increase in the number of contributing subjectivities, though, as has been suggested, the authority struc­ ture of the individual FOSS project may significantly condition this potential, as would the repressive effect of the prevailing technological rationality. Further, as a forum for skills development, FOSS seems to offer a means for growing the base of technically capable contributors, and/or developing the technical sophis­ tication of contributors, thereby enabling a growing number of contributors to access ever more complex, and important elements of the technostructure where rupture might manifest as a truly subversive phenomenon. Finally, with respect to the possibility for real social transformation, the relative signficance of these possibilities increases as capital's appropriation of FOSS proceeeds.

Neither FOSS nor hackers represent a determined conflict with the logic of capital. What FOSS and hackers do represent is potential. This potential derives

335 in part from the nature of technology, and the decidely technological character of both FOSS and hackers, but just as importantly it derives from the ways in which both FOSS and hackers are principally concerned with practice. As the final section of this work has suggested, the practice we consider here is not determined, and as such may assume radical and repressive charactrers, but this in and of itself is enough. This should not be interpreted as a promotion of some vision of the hacker as a romantic antihero, or of FOSS as a new Frankenstein's

Monster. Rather, this is a promotion of an understanding of the technological world that acknowledges the significance and misfortune of concerted struggles on the part of individuals and groups against a repressive technological rationality that can never fully escape its own irony.

336 Notes

:The concept of immateriality is most easily, and most routinely, apprehended in formal physical terms - understood as the lack of material substance. While this formal definition certainly captures a critical aspect of the concept, left in this state it remains incomplete. Rather, it is critical to note that that which is immaterial never exists fully apart from a material reference. That is to say, the immaterial things that fill our lives can be understood in terms of serving some material purpose, and further and more fundamentally, the existence of the immaterial is contingent upon the material. Pursuing this line of argumentation at this high level of abstraction leads well beyond the bounds of this work, and indeed, perhaps beyond the bounds of the intended dis­ cipline of this work. On this basis, I simply suggest that what must be kept in mind when considering the concept of immateriality is the principle that there is an ongoing intermediation between the immaterial and the material. When presented with a world in which there is correspondence between its material and immaterial elements, the inability to understand immateriality in terms beyond those of the reductive formal definition constitutes the basis for the fetishistic treatment of immateriality, whereby the wrongly assumed separateness of the immaterial seems to imbue it with a mystical quality - as having overcome the material. (See section 2.4 in this work, "Information Technology," for a more pointed presentation of this line of thinking.) It is the ex­ pressed intention of this work to reject such a fetishized understanding of the concept of immateriality, and to argue that the persistence of this reduced understanding is indicative of (at least) some of the dynamics of the contemporary processes of social reproduction, while its dearth points beyond these same processes.

2For quick reference see Figure 1.1 Trends in PCT Applications, 1978 - 2009 in: World Intellectual Property Organization, The International Patent System Yearly Review, p. 13.

3The distinction between free and open software is a significant aspect of this anal­ ysis and will be dealt with in more detail in the third chapter. Briefly, the distinction hinges on the difference between freedom defined pecuniarily and freedom defined po­ litically and/or ethically. The latter definition is adopted for Free Software, whereas the former is adopted for Open Source Software. For this reason, FOSS is occasion­ ally referred to as F/LOSS or FLOSS where the 'L' denotes the French libre, which is conceptually distinct from gratuit. In fact, this semantic distinction holds for most Latin derived Western European languages with the exception of English in which it is suppressed in the single word free. See: Stallman, Why "Open Source" misses the point of Free Software.

337 4Horkheimer's discussion of the critical process of knowledge and theory building is especially pertinent to the epistemological dimension of technology. See: Horkheimer, "Traditional and Critical Theory," pp. 200-201.

5Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, pp. 168-169.

6See Appendix: Marx, Capital vol. 1, pp. 1023-1025.

7Ibid., See Chapter 1.

8Of course, as it is used here, value is a loaded term. In this case, it is use value that it being referenced directly, but only inasmuch as use value is a prerequisite for exchange value. The linkage between use value and an extant value product is discussed by Carchedi under the rubric of value destruction. See: Carchedi, Frontiers of Political Economy, p. 138.

9Though not technically business sources, good summaries of the business models that command the majority of attention in the business literature are presented in: We­ ber, The Success of Open Source, pp.' 191-197; and Raymond, "The Magic Cauldron," pp. 134-140.

10Subramaniam, Sen, and Nelson, "Determinants of open source software project success," p. 579.

uMarx, Capital vol. 1, p. 570.

12Benkler provides a nice conceptualization of this difficulty in terms of the crispness of tasks associates with creative and immaterial labour. See: Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, p. 263; Additionally, Shoshana Zuboff provides an extensive treatment of the pressures that information intensive work places on traditional (Taylorist) management practices. See: Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine.

13Aronowitz, How Class Works, pp. 16-22, 162.

14Marx, Grundrisse, p. 706.

15Material on postmaterialism can be found in Ronald Inglehart's work, while ma­ terial on post-scarcity can be found in Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, and Murray Bookchin's collection Post-Scarcity Anarchism. See: Inglehart, "Globalization and Postmodern Values"; Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 16; Bookchin, "Post- Scarcity Anarchism," p. 2.

16The distinction between mass and class is critical here. Marcuse, speaking of the

338 crowd, which may be substituted for mass, suggests that it "unites the atomic subjects of self-preservation who are detached from everything that transcends their selfish inter­ ests and impulses." This unified disinterest is critical, as it suggests that considerations over the classed dimension of social transformation seem increasingly to require the theorization of class naive action originating in the mass. If we consider this along side Benjamin's analysis of Beaudelaire, in which the crowd serves as a catalyst to the antag­ onistic individualism of the flaneur, we begin to understand how such a transformative process might emerge without the need for a theoretically and strategically problem­ atic vanguard. See: Marcuse, "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology," p. 160; Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire."

17Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 74.

18Marx, Capital vol. 1, p. 286.

19Perhaps one of the best known discussions of this principle is presented in Locke's Second Treaties throughout his inquiry into the origins of property. Here Locke as­ sumes a natural origin for all property from which it ultimately follows that man must be driven out of the state of nature and into the human context of formal political association. In failing to recognize the socially constructed nature of property, Locke imposes an antagonistic relationship on humans and the natural world.

20In fact, this is technically inverted, as technology is the general form of tool, and as such what we experience is not the expression of tool within technology, but of technology within tool.

21Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," p. 17.

22Ibid., pp. 9-11.

23Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," pp. 131-132.

24This does not mean that such a reductive framing of technology is necessarily unique to capitalism. There is no reason why other modes of social organization could not assume as, or even more, reductive framings of technology specific to themselves.

25Marx, Capital vol. 1, pp. 163-177.

26A good example of this line of thinking is presented by Marcuse in his discussion of the necessity of the liberation of nature to any broader agenda of political liberation. For Marcuse, the former is inherently linked to the latter to the extent that the failure to understand the human-nature relationship in terms of a mutually intermediating

339 subject-object relationship constitutes a basic element of alienation (a theme adapted out of Marx's discussion of a need for an emancipation of the senses in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844- Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, pp. 64- 65.

27Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844," pp. 70-81.

28 Aronowitz and DiFazio explore a similar theme in their discussion of the differenti­ ation of the categories 'intellectual' and 'professional' as cultural identities. Essentially, the critical distinction comes down to the fact that the latter category is an operational­ ized instance of the former, and in its operationalization assumes a specific 'applied' ( as opposed to conceptual or theoretical) character. The nature of this sort of opera­ tionalization is the focus of the following section. However, for the time being the claim here is simply that what is conventionally taken as technology is socially constructed in such a way that it suppresses important aspects of technology properly understood. This is so due to the extent that the the former is conceptualized as a collection of particular objects which function as means for a determinate end, while the latter is conceptualized as a generalized system of means for which there is no determinate end. To put it in somewhat Hegelian terms: The concrete-particular appearance of technology is conventionally confused with the abstract-general principle of technology. For Aronowitz and DiFazio this operationalization emerges with capitalism in the late 19t/l century. However, where technology is concerned, I, in the vein of Lewis Mum­ ford's thinking, suggest that this tendency has essentially always existed in historically specific forms, but is attenuated under capitalism in particular.

29Marx, "The German Ideology," pp. 155-158.

30Marx, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," pp. 477-478.

31 Significantly, these errors crop up in liberal, socialist, and anarchist varieties. Marx spends time towards the end of the Communist Manifesto examining precisely this issue (with specific attention given to the latter two varieties of the error). The liberal variant of this problem tends to skew heavily towards annexing technology as a force of production for the purpose of making the argument that resolving the issues stemming from the inherent complexity of human society requires an increasingly sophisticated technical-institutional apparatus - thereby constructing technology as the potential end of history. Mill, Weber, and Schumpeter all flirt with this premise in some regard.

32Marx, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," pp. 477-478.

33Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, p. 234.

340 Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," p. 20.

35Marx, Capital vol. 1, pp. 494-495.

36Notably, Mumford expresses a similar sentiment in his description of the human content of the megamachine in terms of "mechanized men". See: Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, p. 190.

37Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital

38Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future, pp. 331-334.

39Arendt's homo faber is presented with a somewhat ethically void character. Homo faber is compelled to erect the human artifice, to set upon nature without too much consideration for how this space is used. Work then becomes self-satisfying but ethically ambiguous with respect to social life. The inherent connection to action here appears in the public nature of the human artifice. Notably, Arendt's arguments on this matter include an atrocious reading of Marx's theory of value in which the concept of value is awkwardly integrated into a Benthamite preference-utility market model. See: Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 151, 163-165.

40Aristotle, "The Politics," See Book I sections 1253b23 through 1254al8 in.

41Ibid., 1254b21.

42In some translations of The Politics, the slave is in fact described as an instrument of action as opposed to a minister of action, as it is here.

43Aristotle, "The Politics," 1253b35.

44In this regard, the understanding of technology being developed here corresponds with Marcuse's notion of a cognitive concept (as opposed to an operational concept), which goes "beyond descriptive reference to particular facts." This transcendence is empirically useful "because it renders the facts recognizable as that which they really are." ... "The "excess" of meaning over and above the operational concept illuminates the limited and even deceptive form in which the facts are allowed to be experienced." See: Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 106.

45In Part 1, Chapters 1-7 provide a fairly comprehensive coverage of this matter. See: Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 13-52.

46Ibid., p. 33.

341 47Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 137.

8Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 38.

49Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 27.

50Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, p. 199.

51While this may not be immediately obvious from the quote selection used here, Foucault is certainly working within this line of thinking. Specifically, both Discipline and Punish, and Madness and Civilization (as well as a number of his other works) focus on how rationality and irrationality are constructed via specific power relations.

52Marx develops this line of argumentation throughout his analysis of the historical development of the division of labour in large scale industry. The initial conception- execution split can be observed in the complex division of labour's predecessor form, Co-operation, but this is developed further by the discussion of a deskilling tendency under the condition of a complex division of labour. (See: Marx, Capital vol. 1, 448- 456, 480-483.) Additionally, the fact that in contemporary parlance, the ordering and reordering of the labour process - whether related to machinery or not - is conventionally referred to as rationalization is illuminating in the context of this discussion, and a matter that Marcuse addresses. (See: Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 146.)

53This is essentially what Braverman identifies as Taylor's third principle of Scientific Management. See: Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, pp. 118-120.

54Marx, Capital vol. 1, pp. 548-549.

55Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: p. 67.

56Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," p. 27.

57Feenberg, Questioning Technology, pp. 15-17.

58For Heidegger's discussion of causation see: Heidegger, "The Question Concern­ ing Technology," pp. 6-7; Feenberg's critique referenced here focuses on deterministic views of technology, with which he associates Heidegger. See: Feenberg, Questioning Technology, pp. 77-81.

59Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, p. 224.

60Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 11.

342 Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 20.

62This is a common theme in much of the work by Horkheimer and Adorno on the mater, but this characterization is put directly in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. See: Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 6; Arendt also makes a similar point. See: Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 139.

63Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," pp. 118-120.

64Horkheimer, "The End of Reason," p. 28.

65Horkheimer, "Traditional and Critical Theory," pp. 201-202.

66Notably Arendt also makes a similar point regarding tool use and reification. See: Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 139; However, Arendt makes no consideration of capitalism as Horkheimer does. See: Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, p. 28.

67Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 10.

68Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, pp. 78-82.

69Marx, Capital vol. 1, pp. 158-159, 163-177.

70Marcuse, "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology," p. 157.

71Benjamin, "Critique of Violence," pp. 294-295.

72Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 9.

73Ibid., pp. 79-84.

74Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Platueaus, p. 366.

75This is a rather quick overview of a complex process that Deleuze and Guattari examine in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia series. (Chapters 1 and 3 from Anti- Oedipus, and sections 1, 9, and 12 from A Thousand Plateaus were selected for their applicability to this line of thought.) In general, Deleuze and Guattari characterize what has up to this point been identified as reification in terms of decoding (rendering explicit), and axiomating (formalizing). The strength of capitalism then resides in the fact that its axiomatic is never saturated, that is always capable of adding a new axiom to the previous ones. (Anti-Oedipus, 250) Deleuze and Guattari find this capacity for apprehending lines of flight foremost in the capitalist state which addresses potential disjunctures by introducing exceptionalities - codes or territorializations - that fulfill

343 the desires of the discontented subjectivities until some time at which these introduced codes or territorial demarcations can be decoded, deterritorialized, and incorporated into the axiomatic.

76Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 36.

77Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 6.

78The concepts: functional site, distribution, and serial space are derived from Fou- cault's discussion of the disciplinary apparatus. See: Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 141-147.

79Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 31-32.

80Ibid., p. 254.

81This builds off of the previous note on Foucault, and completes the discussion by introducing the notion of rank, and then fusing the distributive assemblage onto the notion of an economy of punishment which Foucault develops slightly earlier on. See: Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 86-89; Notably, Adorno and Horkheimer also explore a similar theme in stating that "... gradations in the standard of living correspond very precisely to the degree by which classes and individuals inwardly adhere to the system." This seems relevant to mention here for the fact that it draws attention to the fact that thinkers in The Frankfurt School were aware of how the disciplinary apparatus of capitalism could accommodate multiplicity. See: Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 120.

82Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 25-26.

830f course, the spectacle is not limited to merely visual content, though Debord does note that "... sight is the most easily deceived sense and is therefore fitted to the domination of the spectacle." See: Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 36.

84Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 262.

85Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 50-51.

86Marx, Capital vol. 1, p. 506.

87Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Platueaus, pp. 364-65.

88For example: Current concern over environmental degradation has given rise to the substitution of environmentally friendly green technologies/commodities for their less

344 environmentally friendly counterparts. Generally speaking, however, the substitution is not enforced, or if so, weakly. Rather, existing market mechanisms are generally selected as the means for implementing pollution reform. The notion that a market system driven by a profit motive might be intrinsically linked to environmental degra­ dation is considered beyond the pale.

89The implicit gendering of this statement, and the accompanying characterization, seems quite appropriate in light of other discourses focused on the interplay between patriarchy and capitalism, and in turn alludes to the critical issue of how technology is gendered. This is, however, a topic that goes beyond the scope of the current discussion.

90Again, this is in keeping with Deleuze and Guattari's claim that the axiomatic is never saturated. In this regard, to suggest that there is a possibility that technology may act as a constraint on the appropriative power of the axiomatic is not equivalent to suggesting that it overcomes it entirely. This naturally implies that the scope and scale of individual disruptions may in fact be quite minimal, though not necessarily inconsequential.

91Mill, On Liberty, p. 32.

92Ibid., pp. 69-71.

93Ibid., p. 112.

94This is clear from Weber's discussion of legal authority in juxtapozition to the sub­ sequent discussions of traditional and charismatic authority. See: Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, pp. 329-341.

95Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: pp. 17-21.

96Ronald Inglehart has explored this in some degree in his argument regarding the character qualities that correspond with a postmaterialist orientation. Specifically, that new generation of people that have attained a degree of security which frees them from concerning themselves with the material constraints of life at a relatively young age, are theorized to be more inclined to think about issues in terms of social (as opposed to individual) contexts. They are, to put it bluntly, socially conscious. See: Inglehart, "Globalization and Postmodern Values," pp. 220-221.

97Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: pp. 22-26.

98In fact, even the conditions for the realization of this change remain remarkably consistent, to the extent that the Marxist emphasis on developing a revolutionary class

345 consciousness is not all that dissimilar to Inglehart's postmaterialism claim. Really, the key difference is that where the revolutionary class consciousness is born of crisis, it's postmaterial counterpart is born of contentment.

"This definition is a quick summary of the basic themes presented by Herbert Mar­ cuse in One-Dimensional Man, and Murray Bookchin in his collection Post-Scarcity Anarchism, specifically the essays "Post-Scarcity Anarchism", and "Towards a Libera­ tion Technology".

100Bookchin, "Post-Scarcity Anarchism," pp. 3-5.

101Bookchin, "Towards a Liberation Technology," pp. 60-65.

102Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 101-102.

103Ibid., p. 130.

104Bookchin, "Post-Scarcity Anarchism," p. 5.

105Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, p. 16.

106Marcuse makes this claim in Counterrevolution and Revolt. However, in discussing the potential for developing a revolutionary rationality in the earlier work: Some Social Implications of Modern Technology, he also makes the claim that: "Such a rationality can fully develop only in social groups whose organization is not patterned on the ap­ paratus in its prevailing forms or on its agencies and institutions. For the latter are pervaded by the technological rationality which shapes the attitude and interests of those dependent on them." This potential discrepancy is worth noting, and indicative of the complexity of the technology issue, as well as Marcuse's shifting (I would sug­ gest exploratory or experimental) approach to it. See: Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, pp. 55-56; Marcuse, "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology," p. 149.

107Dyer-Witheford makes this observation with regard to Regulation Theory perspec­ tives on technology and social change, though it is clearly applicable to Bookchin's claim. See: Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: p. 56.

108Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future, p. 45.

109A critique developed in a discussion of the (im)possibility of Marcuse's Great Re­ fusal (ie. psychic liberation) in: Feenberg, Questioning Technology, pp. 104-105.

110It is pertinent to note that Marcuse was certainly aware of the possible disconti­ nuities between his theoretical framework, and the various strategies for praxis that

346 he proposed. Indeed, while the tone of the discussion in Counterrevolution and Revolt appears almost as a naive break with earlier work, alternate formulations, and specifi­ cally his concept of a Great Refusal are generally quite abstract, and presented a highly stylized language of aesthetics - not dissimilar to Heidegger's turn late in The Ques­ tion Concerning Technology, and the work of other thinkers of the Frankfurt School. Moreover, the tone taken in Counterrevolution and Revolt can probably be explained in terms of the instrumental purpose of the work itself: inspiring revolutionary action among a disaffected American youth. In this regard, it is legitimate, and crucial, to recognize that there are indeed inconsistencies within Marcuse's theoretical model, but these inconsistencies do not necessarily carry over into his political and ethical models. Whether the fact of the former cripples the latter significantly is a matter of debate; though the position presented here suggests that this is indeed the case.

111 Feenberg, Questioning Technology, 178-179.

112Feenberg makes reference to Foucault's notion of "subjugated knowledges" (as well as de Certeau's notion of "tactics") in developing this concept. This is notable for the fact that the addition of Foucault's thinking on micropolitics to the Frankfurt School's concept of a technology of total administration allows him to come to this point. See: Feenberg, Questioning Technology, pp. 110-113.

113Referencing Antonio Negri's work: Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: p. 174.

114For and example see: Holtzman, Craig Hughes, and Kevin Van Meter, "Do It Yourself ... and the Movement Beyond Capitalism," pp. 44-45.

115Dyer-Witheford makes a similar claim in describing the fractal logic of capital. Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: pp. 82-83.

116Ibid., p. 227.

117Marx, Capital vol. 1, pp. 772-776.

118Bookchin, "Towards a Liberation Technology," p. 79.

119Citing Negri, Dyer-Witheford draws a similar conclusion, though Negri's discussion is explicitly framed in terms of resistance, which in the context of the perspective being developed here is perhaps a bit too determinate. See: Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: p. 172.

120Deleuze and Guattari reach a similar conclusion in their examination of smooth spaces - which in this context would be the spaces in which rupture could occur.

347 Briefly, they state that smooth space is not inherently revolutionary. Rather, what determines the relationship of smooth spaces to the State (which they focus on as the principle bearer of the axiomatic) and striated spaces depends on the nature of "... the interactions they are part of and the concrete conditions of their exercise or establishment." See: Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Platueaus, p. 387.

121Ibid., pp. 223-224.

122What is critical to note here is the way in which technologies are simultaneously integrated and resist integration into the capitalist assemblage, and additionally, how the useful integration of technology entails its reorientation (away from its originally intended object) or operationalization such that its antagonistic character is made pro­ ductive. The extent to which this reorientation is complete, however, is never ensured, and as such, subsumed technological antagonism always threatens to reappear. See: ibid., pp. 416-423.

123Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 239-240.

124Deleuze and Guattari have conceptualized the capitalist assemblage in terms of striated space. This is a useful conceptual device for the fact that while the stria- tions illustrate the constraints that instrumentalize reason (and desire for Deleuze and Guattari), the presence of high points necessitates the presence of low points. These low points constitute smooth spaces in which movement, thought and desire are not (as) constrained. These then are spaces in which potential ruptures (or war machines for Deleuze and Guattari) could emerge. See: Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Platueaus, pp. 384-385.

125 Citing David Harvey, Manuel Castells sees an essential linkage between the rise of global markets and the ability for IT to functionally compress space and time. Speed of circulation is emphasized in this argument, and in this regard this perspective links up well with the claim made here regarding the financialization of capital - which by the virtue of IT is now capable of realizing near instantaneous transaction speeds. See: Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, pp. 465-466.

126Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: p. 31.

127There are, however, significant linkages to be made in this regard as well. Specifi­ cally, DARPA's role in developing the Internet should not be overlooked. Furthermore, it was at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) that the World Wide Web was developed.

128Notably, Andrew Feenberg provides an excellent discussion of the reaction within

348 the scientific community to the established destructive capacity of nuclear weapons. Though this is not a generalized consciousness by any means, Feenberg's discussion underscores nicely how the perspective regarding nuclear technology shifted radically once it had fully materialized in the form of the atomic bomb. See: Feenberg, Ques­ tioning Technology, pp. 47-49.

129While the link to Marx's thought is evident here, it is notable that Heidegger explores a similar theme in his discussion of causality and technology, in which he discerns stages, dimensions or types of causality, among which conceptualization is included. See: Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," pp. 5-8.

130Manuel Castells develops these themes in his discussion/definition of the Internet, which he sees as a composite system of networks each characterized by pervasiveness, multifaceted decentralization, and flexibility. See: Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, p. 385.

131Feenberg notes, as has already been explored in some detail, that Habermas presents an argument not dissimilar to this. For Habermas, the slippage derives from the claim that the Weberian process of rationalization is not synonymous with technical control (contra The Frankfurt School and Heidegger), and that corrosive total administration is a byproduct of the specific historical institutional forms associated with technology. Thus new technological capacities, and their associated organizational forms, are not necessarily ideologically determined. Castells follows in a similar vein in claiming that the rise of the global informational economy is characterized by the emergence of a new organizational logic which corresponds with the development of new forms of authority. Both thinkers ultimately disaggregate authority from technology, though Castells' per­ spective is arguably more ideologically informed - or at least explicit - than Habermas'. See: Feenberg, Questioning Technology, pp. 155-156; Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, p. 164.

132Bookchin, "Towards a Liberation Technology," p. 44.

133Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, p. 214.

134This statement uses Zuboff's taxonomy for skills as her analysis on this matter is quite complimentary to Braverman's discussion of Taylor's third principle of Scientific Management. See: Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine, pp. 186-188; Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, pp. 118-121.

135Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine, pp. 178-181.

136Mitchell, Me++, p. 15.

349 137The opening chapter of Negri's The Politics of Subversion exemplifies this sort of optimistic linkage between communication and praxis within strands of autonomist Marxism. See: Negri, The Politics of Subversion, pp. 47-60.

138Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, pp. 370-371.

139Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 179.

140Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, pp. 79-80.

141Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, p. 285.

142William Mitchell is actually rather explicit about this connection between culture and IT. As Mitchell notes, identity reinforcement traditionally came from a few strong ties, and many weak ties established on a face-to-face basis. With the advent of IT, and as a result of its communicative capacity, these weak ties are able to gain depth, and consequently we are increasingly defining ourselves in terms of overlapping sets of relationships. See: Mitchell, Me++, p. 17.

143Again Castells' thinking exemplifies this claim. In discussing patterns stemming from multimedia propagation - a principle consequence of the diffusion of IT - Castells links the growing importance of culture to the interactive capacity of IT. The following quote is especially telling in this regard: "It is precisely because of the diversification, multimodality, and versatility of the new communication system that is is able to embrace and integrate all forms of expression, as well as the diversity of interests, values, and imaginations, including the expression of social conflicts. But the price to pay for inclusion in the system is to adapt to its logic, to its language, to its points of entry, to its encoding and decoding." What is clearly perplexing about this statement is how the claim made in the second sentence significantly qualifies the claim made in the first. This qualification can only be rendered unproblematic if we the logic to which we are expected to adapt is taken as unproblematic. Castells is clearly aware of the potential one-dimensionality of technology, but seems to couch his estimation of IT as a whole in a cost-benefit analysis broken down along the lines of cultural-tolerance and instrumental rationality. See: Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, pp. 402-403.

144William Mitchel makes a rather dramatic claim to this effect towards the end of chapter 3 in his book Me++. Reflecting on how many ways he can be connected to the Internet, and IT networks in general, Mitchell muses about how he is effectively a part of the technology of the network referring to himself as an IP address (IP stands for Internet Protocol, and IP addresses are a numeric sequence used to identify the destination and origin of individual pieces of data flowing over a network), and a router (a device used that ensures that the bundles of data are appropriately directed across

350 the network). Mitchell ultimately embraces this fetishization, and in doing so speculates about the extent to technology has allowed him to overcome his own humanity, with the claim that "I link, therefore I am." See: Mitchell, Me++, p. 62.

145Adorno makes this point in his critique regarding the Kantian transcendental sub­ ject. See: Adorno, "Subject and Object," p. 500.

146Feenberg, Questioning Technology, p. 7.

147Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, p. 67.

148The data pertaining to this economic dynamic is presented in the section entitled Is knowledge-based productivity specific to the informational economy? in chapter two of The Rise of the Network Society. The connection of this economic analysis to the broader claim that it might be connected to new democratic possibilities facilitate by IT is developed subsequently in the work, and constitutes the major theme of the work as whole.

149Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 234.

150The relationship between technology and authenticity is a central component of Benjamin's work: Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Though Benjamin was writing on technological forms the predate the networked IT form, his claim that re­ production undermines the authenticity of a work, and relatedly, also undermines its authority, is intimately linked to the argument developed here. See: Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," pp. 220-224.

151Benjamin makes this claim in the context of discussing the interaction between the camera and the human body. See: Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," p. 228.

152For a fairly succinct take on Horkheimer and Adorno's argument regarding the culture industry see: Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 101-103.

153Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," pp. 158-159.

154Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, pp. 103-104.

155Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: pp. 86-87.

156Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Platueaus, 7-9.

157Deleuze and Guattari are quite clear on the matter that rhizomes cease being rhi-

351 zomes, and their rhizomatic dynamics are curtailed whenever a centre is set. Further, Deleuze and Guattari insist that even polycentric structures (which is consistent with Castells' notion of the network form), are ultimately arboreal in nature, and there­ fore incapable of achieving rhizomatic dynamics. See: Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Platueaus, pp. 16-17.

158Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: p. 158.

159As a point of order, it's worth noting that the notion of a democratic appropriation of technology is somewhat problematic here, as any critique that suggests that human emancipation is coextensive with the demise of capitalism must unpack the common sense linkage between democracy and capitalism, as well as more fundamental issues related to the nature of democracy itself (ex. the extent to which direct democracy, as opposed to a representative alternative, is actually taken as democracy at all). That said, The Minitel example is reference by Castells, Feenberg and Dyer-Witheford. Addi­ tionally, Dyer-Witheford provides three additional examples from East-Timor, Nigeria, and France which do an excellent job of illustrating how communicative action can be effectively transformed into historical action. See: Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: pp. 86, 160-162; Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, pp. 373-374; Feenberg, Questioning Technology, p. 126.

160Mitchell, Me++, p. 81.

161The actual history here is considerably more nuanced than presented, but further elabouration is really not necessary, as the essential elements are being presented. However, Steven Weber has provided an excellent, and fairly exhaustive, recounting of this history in his book "The Success of Open Source". Further, Yochai Benkler has provided a fairly detailed discussion of the legal terrain that was negotiated by AT&T during this anti-trust suit in his book "The Wealth of Networks". Anybody interested in a more detailed history of the origins of FOSS might refer to these sources.

162There are a number of technical exceptions to this claim. Specifically, scripting languages, such as Perl, or hybridized languages such as Python or Java are compiled at execution time, and so, in some sense the computer does directly read source code via an on-the-fly compiler. Additionally, compilers, which convert source code to binary code, in general might be considered exceptions to this statement. These however are a very small subset of technical exceptions with little bearing on the material to this point.

163As a point of disambiguation it bears mentioning that the term Personal Com­ puter - PC - makes no specific claim on the variety of operating system, application,

352 or hardware that comprise the computer. The competition starting in the mid-1980s between IBM and Microsoft on one side, and Apple on the other, muddied this def­ inition. Rather, the term PC designates the given computer as a system that is less powerful and more affordable than other 'larger' systems, such as those built by DEC on which the Unix OS was initially designed to run. Apple makes PCs.

164These aspects of scarcity in technical talent, and prohibitive cost as motivating factors driving cooperation within the early development history of IT are noted by both Weber and Raymond. Castells also makes this point, but links it to a long-standing history of this sort of behaviour within academic communities, which is consistent with the history presented here. See: Weber, The Success of Open Source, p. 23; Raymond, "A Brief History of Hackerdom," pp. 3-12; Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, p. 48.

165Lerner and Jean Tirole, "The Economics of Technology Sharing," p. 101.

166Weber, The Success of Open Source, pp. 36-37.

167Gnu is a recursive acronym standing for: Gnu's Not Unix

168 Stallman, The Gnu Manifesto.

169Ibid.

170In the long excerpt presented this is probably most clearly indicated by Stallman's reference to "the golden rule", and by his appeal to conscience. Later in the work however, Stallman directly evokes Kant's categorical imperative in reasoning how pro­ prietary approaches to software production and distribution are universally harmful. In general (noted by most commentators on the FOSS movement) there is an consis­ tent ethical overtone to the arguments and rhetoric put forward from the Free Software camp, as opposed to the Open Source camp, which tends to focus on matters of eco­ nomic and technical efficiency.

• 171 A colloquial way of making this distinction within FOSS communities is to contrast libre and gratis in terms of 'free as in speech', as opposed to 'free as in beer.'

172It should be noted that Stallman explicitly states that you can absolutely charge money for Free Software. The claim that pecuniary freedom necessarily follows from freedom to source code simply recognizes the fact that monetization of software would be effectively impossible where everybody could reproduce the work of others without consequence.

353 ;Free Software Foundation, Gnu General Public License v.l.

174This is formally specified in the GPL by the actual statement invoking it in which original authorship is specified, and as per section two subsection 'a', which stipulates that any modification must be properly attributed by the modifier.

175A 'distribution' describes a specific combination and configuration of the Linux kernel with associated applications (ex. Slackware Linux, SuSE Linux, Debian Linux, Ubuntu Linux, etc.). In essence, all Linux distributions are essentially identical, though they may vary significantly where look-and-feel (due to the implementation of differ­ ent Desktop Environments, such as KDE or Gnome, for instance) or out-of-the-box functionality (due to different combinations of applications installed) are concerned.

176Stallman, The Gnu Manifesto.

177The most conspicuous, and oft cited examples would be the BIND DNS system, which resolves individual network addresses for computers, and subnetworks, into do­ main names, and the sendmail mail transfer agent, which essentially enables email.

178Raymond, "Revenge of the Hackers," pp. 175-179.

179Perens, The Open Source Definition.

180To some extent, Apple's OS X offering could rightly be included here as well, except for the fact that OS X actually incorporates elements from the BSD family of OSs. In this regard, Apple's OS X underscores the success of OSS, while also pointing to a potential limitation - the near total subsumption of an open source offering in a proprietary one.

181DeLanda, "The Politics of Software," p. 99.

182Marx, Capital vol. 1, p. 125.

183Ibid., pp. 131-138.

184Ibid., pp. 164-165.

185Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, pp. 29-30.

186Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: pp. 66-67.

187Marx, Capital vol. 1, p. 646.

188Ibid., p. 1024.

354 'Marx, Capital vol. 1, p. 945.

190Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, pp. 4-5.

191Marx, Capital vol. 1, pp. 1038 - 1049.

192Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, p. 415.

193Marx, Capital vol. 2, p. 135.

194Morris-Suzuki, "Capitalism in the Computer Age and Afterword," pp. 64-65.

195For a discussion of the labour-value relationship see: (Marx, Capital, volume 1, 125- 131.) For a preliminary discussion of the price-value distinction see: (Marx, Capital, volume 3, 117-132.)

196Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, p. 412.

197 As conceptualized here, the destruction of value lies in the inability of the employing capital to realize the investment it has made in the labour commodity. Though it differs in some minor regard, refer to Carchedi's "Frontiers of Political Economy" for a more pointed discussion of value destroying labour. Additionally, Jim Davis and Michael Stack have provided a short discussion on this matter, that is more in line with that presented here. See: Carchedi, Frontiers of Political Economy, p. 138; Davis and Michael Stack, "The Digital Advantage."

198Carchedi, Frontiers of Political Economy, p. 128.

199Refer to Marx's discussion of value forms preceding this quick summary of the concept of the commodity fetish at: Marx, Capital vol. 1, pp. 166-167.

200Lakhani and Wolf estimate paid contributors constitute about 40% of the total contributing community, and in a report issued by the Linux Foundation inquiring into participation metrics for Linux kernel development project, the authors suggest that over 70% of all kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid (either directly or indirectly) for their work. See: Lakhani and Wolf, "Why Hackers Do What They Do."

201Dahlander and Magnusson, "How do Firms Make Use of Open Source Communi­ ties?" P. 643.

202McPherson, Proffitt, and Hale-Evans, Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution.

355 03This claim requires some clarification, as Red Hat does offer enterprise versions of its software for a considerable fee along side a free community version of the Fedora Linux distribution. However, the technical functionality of the two offerings is effec­ tively identical (i.e. it would be entirety possible to configure Fedora to match the functionality of the Red Hat Enterprise offering). The price paid for the Enterprise offering in this case is attached to a subscription to service and support from Red Hat, and not specifically to the provision of the software in particular.

204Microsoft, Annual Report Pursuant To Section 13 Or 15(d) Of The Securities Exchange Act Of 1934 For The Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 2009.

205Weber, The Success of Open Source, pp. 126-127.

206This should be considered a nod to the validity of Carchedi's assertion, as here we find a commodity vendor classifying a non-commodity as a competitive commodity due to the fact that the vendor stands to lose market share. From the individual capital's perspective (i.e. Microsoft's) this makes sense - as the capital is not concerned with the commodity status of its competition, only the fact that it stands to lose profit. As • such, in this case, though Microsoft fears its commodities might lose ground to OSS commodities - this is not what is actually happening. The fact that a more fundamental process of decommodification might be at work is hidden from view behind the figures jotted at the bottom of the ledger, and would only come into sight if capital as a whole, within a given sector, came together and compared their performance collectively.

207This in fact appears to be a strategy which Microsoft is actually pursuing to some degree, as, in the summer of 2009 it was revealed that Microsoft had integrated some GPL covered code into drivers for its proprietary HyperV virtualization server soft­ ware. Further, though proprietary, the HyperV server is in fact provided by Microsoft, free of charge, a pricing decision, which in this case, can reasonably be interpreted as designed to grow market share, and consequently, mind share for its proprietary offer­ ing. Notably, Microsoft was threatened with legal action due to GPL violation, which resulted in the company actually converting the entire body of code for the drivers in question to FOSS covered by the GPLv2.

208Eric Raymond has posted the full set of Halloween Documents on his website, along with his own commentary on them. Refer to: http://www.catb.org/ esr/halloween/index.html

209Standish Group International, Free Open Source Software Is Costing Vendors $60 Billion.

210Gillen, The Opportunity for Linux in a New Economy.

356 Marx, Capital vol. 1, pp. 433-437.

212Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, p. 36.

213Gallaway and Douglas Kinnear, "Open Source Software, the Wrongs of Copyright, and the Rise of Technology," p. 469.

214Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, p. 32.

215Ibid., p. 32.

216Demil and Xavier Lecocq, "Neither Market nor Hierarchy nor Network," p. 1406.

217Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, p. 51.

218For a thoroughgoing historical account, see: Walters, "The Booksellers in 1759 and 1774: The Battle for Literary Property."

219Feather, "The Publishers and the Pirates. British copyright law in theory and practice, 1710-1775," p. 21.

220Gallaway and Douglas Kinnear, "Open Source Software, the Wrongs of Copyright, and the Rise of Technology," pp. 467-468.

221Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, p. 37.

222Gallaway and Douglas Kinnear, "Open Source Software, the Wrongs of Copyright, and the Rise of Technology," p. 472.

223Essentially the tragedy of the commons thesis is an attempt to demonstrate how a pervasive free rider effect will be realized on any public good with the net result of degrading the utility of the good to a point at which it loses all of its utility, or in the case of nonrival commodities, resulting in the under supply of the commodity due to lack of incentive to produce it. Originally, this thesis was offered up to justify the enclosure movements that ultimately obliterated the commons in England from the 14th throughout the 18th centuries, but with respect to FOSS, we might focus on the underlying argument of Gates' 'open letter to hobbyists.'

224Runge and Defrancesco, "Exclusion, Inclusion, and Enclosure," p. 1717.

225Lerner, Pathak, and Tirole, "The Dynamics of Open-Source Contributors," p. 115.

226Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, pp. 37-38.

357 Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, pp. 37-38.

228Gallaway and Douglas Kinnear, "Open Source Software, the Wrongs of Copyright, and the Rise of Technology," p. 472; Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, p. 38.

229DeLanda, "The Politics of Software," p. 9.

230For the distinction between use-value, exchange-value, and value see section one in chapter one of: Marx, Capital vol. 1, pp. 125-131.

231Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, pp. 62-63.

232These figures were taken from the 2009 industry profiles for the Global Appli­ cation Software and Global Systems Software industries compiled and published by Datamonitor. (See bibliography for full source detail.)

233W3Counter: http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

234The success of the Apple App Store is a testament to the ease with which large commercial and small independent software producers alike can make a foray into this market space.

235This is perhaps most clearly reflected in the following excerpt taken from the pream­ ble of version one of the GPL: "To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it." See: Free Software Foundation, Gnu General Public License v.l.

236Weber, The Success of Open Source, p. 182.

237Refer to the section Of Property in: Locke, "The Second Treatise," pp. 111-121.

238Stallman, Why Software Should Not Have Owners.

239Rousseau, On the Social Contract, pp. 27-29.

240Ghosh and Schmidt, Open Source and Open Standards, p. 3.

241Figures for tables 3.3 and 3.4 were taken from the 2009 industry profiles for the Global Internet Software and Services and Global Software and Services industries compiled and published by Datamonitor. (See bibliography for full source detail.)

242 Raymond, "The Magic Cauldron," pp. 136-138.

358 Krishnamurthy, "An Analysis of Open Source Business Models," p. 293.

244Rusovan, Lawford, and Parnas, "Open Source Software Development," pp. 154-155.

245Lerner and Jean Tirole, "The Economics of Technology Sharing," p. 113.

246For Raymond's explicit treatment of this point see: Raymond, "The Magic Caul­ dron," pp. 151-152.

247This section is greatly informed by Dirk Riehle's discussion of the role of OSS with respect to IT solutions providers. See: Riehle, "The Economic Motivation of Open Source Software."

248Marx, Capital vol. 3, pp. 371-372.

249Ibid., pp. 317-375.

250Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, pp. 258-259.

251Ibid., pp. 419, 421.

252Subramaniam, Sen, and Nelson, "Determinants of open source software project success," p. 579.

253Carchedi, Frontiers of Political Economy, p. 135.

254Marx's treatment of rent is principally focused on discussions of agricultural pro­ duction, though he does occasionally punctuate his discussion with acknowledgements of how the rent principle extends to the economic activities of capital proper.

255Marx, Capital vol. 3, p. 752.

256Marx, Capital vol. 1, pp. 320-323.

257Marx, Capital vol. 3, p. 127.

258Ibid., p. 897.

259Ibid., pp. 882-907.

260The caveat 'currently engaged in production' is quite important here, as it is pos­ sible that even worse qualities of land are brought into production depending on the established social demand. Thus the absolute quality of Absolute Rent speaks to a spe­ cific period of production in which a definite number of landed capitals are implicated.

359 Across multiple periods of production new lands may be engaged and/or existing lands may be disengaged, and as such, which lands bear the Absolute Rent and which bear Differential rent is contingent upon the relative qualities of lands engaged at a definite time.

261 At this point it seems pertinent to draw attention to the recurring theme of landed property in-and-around the intellectual property rights milieu. Specifically, the contin­ ual evocation of the tragedy of the commons thesis as a pivotal argument underscoring the necessity of intellectual property rights, and the reaction to this argument which emerged in the form of the Creative Commons licensing scheme (intended to apply FOSS type licensing to nontechnical creative works), provide two very explicit exam­ ples of this recurrent theme within the discourse. Benkler's notion of commons based peer-production is another such example. Notably, Marx's discussion of rent is for the most part, premised on the argument that the enclosure movement which put an end to the commons system gave rise to the class of rent taking property owners.

262Marx, Capital vol. 3, pp. 902, 906.

263Ibid., pp. 842-843.

264Davis and Michael Stack, "The Digital Advantage," p. 135.

265Marx, Capital vol. 3, 772-773.

266Marx is clear on this point, though he sees this as an exceptional case, which indeed it was with respect to the time and specific historical circumstances in which he was writing. This is obviously not the case today. See: Marx, Capital vol. 3, p. 785.

267This line of argumentation forms the better part of Capital, volume 2. What is im­ portant to note is that what capital seeks is a continuous flow in the circuit of capital which is otherwise prone to encountering disruptions, in the form of bottlenecks in the reflux of capital, brought on by time requirements for both the production and circu­ lation processes. Value recouped as money capital will be transformed into productive capital as needed by the individual capital in question. Though the value product rep­ resented in the recouped money capital will reflect the labour that produced it, how it is applied (i.e. exchanged against labour and constant capital) is the discretion of the capital. Though this argument is developed at length throughout Capital, volume 2, the chapter on The Turnover of Variable Capital is particularly salient to this discussion. See: Marx, Capital vol. 2, pp. 369-393.

268Ibid., pp. 109-143.

360 Marx, Capital vol. 3, 374.

This point is derived from Marx's discussion of changes in the mass versus the rate of profit in volume three. However, during this discussion Marx has already moved to using prices of production, and so his mathematic taxonomy differs somewhat from what is presented here. See: Marx, Capital vol. 3, pp. 246-247.

271Ibid., pp. 142-143.

272Marx, Capital vol. 1, p. 774.

273Marx, Capital vol. 2, pp. 148-166, 432-437.

274Carchedi, Frontiers of Political Economy, p. 61.

275Roughly, this value transfer occurs because while modal-capitals determine the market price of a commodity, the capitals with above-modal OCCs achieve a higher level of productivity thereby achieving a higher ratio between value produced, and value consumed. These capitals produce a unit of output for a lower cost price, though the price of production for the commodity is determined by capitals bearing higher cost prices. This differential results in capitals exhibiting an above-modal OCC achieving a higher ratio between price and value within the transformation function.

276This line of argumentation is similar to that invoked to argue against intellectual property rights to the extent that the fair return to innovation (in terms of above average profit) is argued to be achievable in the period of time during which a new technology propagates from the innovating firm to its competitors. This is otherwise known as first mover advantage. (See: Marx, Capital, volume 1, 530, for a similar analysis.) However, it should be noted that the duration of this time will vary across capitals, and will in part be determined by the extent to which the current technologies • have operated within their technical and financial lifespans. Simply ejecting existing technology in favour of a free technology, regardless of whether or not it is more effi­ cient, entails destroying the value stored in that technology that has not already been transferred to commodities via the production process. Capital must get its money's worth. (See: Marx, Capital, volume 3, 199.) In this case, the determination hinges on a comparison of the value productive gain attained through technology change to the magnitude of the value destroyed in the same process, all with respect to profitability time-lines. As always, outside of a value theory analysis of this matter, this calculation would be carried out at the level of prices, rather than values. (Marx's discussion of these considerations can be found in Capital, volume 2, chapters 7 to 9, in which Marx deals with turnover time, fixed and circulating capital, and the turnover of the total capital.)

361 Smith, "The Systematic Place of Technological Rents in Capital III," pp. 121-122.

278Here Smith draws the concept of warranted rates of growth from: Richard Walker. "The Dynamics of Value, Price and Profit," Capital and Class 35(1988): 169-72. See: ibid., p. 122.

279Marx, Capital vol. 3, p. 785.

280Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, p. 110.

281 Johnson, "Collaboration, Peer Review and Open Source Software," p. 478; Runge and Defrancesco, "Exclusion, Inclusion, and Enclosure," p. 1720.

282The logic driving the sort of analysis presented here, has been theoretically fa­ cilitated by the intervention of the transaction cost economics perspective, originally developed in order to rationalize the existence of the firm. Briefly, according to the neoclassical perspective, the most efficient structure for transmitting information is the self-regulating free market. However, the most successful entities in the free market tend to be very large firms whose internal structures are premised on traditional prac­ tices of managerial control. As such, a large portion of what is ostensibly considered market activity - that located within firms - does not conform to the self-regulating model. Transaction Cost Economics theorizes this in terms of a disjuncture which exists between the micro- and macroeconomic levels in terms of informational flows, whereby costs associated with certain kinds of information transactions are best minimized via managerial control at the firm level, while others are best minimized by the market.

283Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, p. 62.

284Weber, The Success of Open Source, pp. 25 - 36.

285Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, pp. 125-129.

286Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine, pp. 235-253.

287Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, p. 257.

288Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, pp. 155-170.

289Ibid., pp. 253-255.

290Kenney, "Value Creation in the Late Twentieth Century," p. 97.

291Marx, Capital vol. 1, pp. 439-454.

362 292Antonio Negri discusses a similar dynamic in his theorization of the socialized worker. Negri situates this cyclical dynamic in Marx's discussion of real subsumption, and identifies it not as cyclical but by it properly political designation: revolutionary. See: Negri, The Politics of Subversion, pp. 78-81.

293Marx, Grundrisse,- p. 706.

294Carchedi, Frontiers of Political Economy, pp. 15-16.

295Marx, Capital vol. 1, pp. 134-135.

296Weber, The Success of Open Source, pp. 150-151.

297Marx, Capital vol. 3, pp. 884-885.

298U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2008 National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates.

299This interpretation follows from Braverman's deskilling thesis, but in this case, Zuboff's discussion of textualization is extremely useful to keep in mind. As noted earlier, what is key to Zuboff's discussion of textualization is the principle that certain intellective skills are resistant to outright deskilling, and in fact, the textualization of work may generate new skill demands. Thus, Zuboff's treatment of this issue expresses deskilling tendencies and countertendencies as inherently linked phenomena within the informated labour process.

300Lerner and Jean Tirole, "The Economics of Technology Sharing," p. 104; Lerner and Tirole, "Economic Perspectives on Open Source," pp. 57-61.

301 This is a recurrent theme in Lerner's work. See: Lerner and Jean Tirole, "The Economics of Technology Sharing," p. 112; Lerner, Pathak, and Tirole, "The Dynamics of Open-Source Contributors," pp. 114-115.

302Moore and Taylor, "Exploitation of the self in community-based software produc­ tion," pp. 109-117.

303U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2010-11 Edition: Computer Software Engineers and Computer Programmers.

304Karatzogianni and Michaelide, "Cyberconflict at the edge of Chaos," pp. 149-150.

305This depiction of merit is constructed from a number of sprawling discussions on this issue. Additional useful material from Raymond is presented in Apendix A of The

363 Cathedral and the Bazaaar collection in the short essay "How to Become a Hacker" (particularity in the section entitled "Status in the Hacker Culture"). Otherwise see: Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere," pp. 84-92.

306Raymond, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," pp. 50-54.

307Ibid., pp. 30-36.

308Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, pp. 166-174.

309Raymond, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," p. 24.

310Fitzgerald, "Has Open Source Software a Future?" Pp. 95-96; Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, pp. 100-102.

311See the subsection Basics of the Unix Philosophy (http://www.faqs.org/docs/ artu/chOls06.html) in: Raymond, The Art of Unix Programming.

312See Carlo Vercellone's work, From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Ele­ ments for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism for a discussion of how the current stage of advanced capitalism might be facing its own contradictions with the onset of the General Intellect.

313Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," pp. 12-13.

314Raymond, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," p. 61.

315Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, pp. 230-246.

316Raymond, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," p. 23.

317Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, pp. 100-102.

318Marx, Capital vol. 2, pp. 200-203.

319Marx, Capital vol. 1, pp. 343-344.

320Dahlander and Magnusson, "How do Firms Make Use of Open Source Communi­ ties?" Pp. 638 - 640.

321Lerner and Tirole, "Economic Perspectives on Open Source," pp. 54-55.

322Karatzogianni and Michaelide, "Cyberconflict at the edge of Chaos," p. 151.

364 Fitzgerald, "Has Open Source Software a Future?" Pp. 98-99.

324Riehle, "The Economic Motivation of Open Source Software," pp. 30-31.

325Cf. Weber, The Success of Open Source, pp. 144-145.

326Lerner, Pathak, and Tirole, "The Dynamics of Open-Source Contributors," p. 116.

327Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere," p. 103.

328Weber, The Success of Open Source, pp. 11-12.

329Lerner and Tirole, "Economic Perspectives on Open Source," pp. 53-54.

330Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere," p. 72.

331Weber, The Success of Open Source, pp. 159-160.

332Stewart and Sanjay Gosain, "The Impact of Ideology on Effectiveness in Open Source Software Development Teams," pp. 295-296.

333Fitzgerald, "The Transformation of Open Source Software," p. 596.

334Lerner and Jean Tirole, "The Economics of Technology Sharing," p. 112.

335This is, as noted earlier, explained in terms of Linus' Law - "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." Critically, however, as Karatzogianni and Michaelide suggest, this is not the product of a labour process premised on any sense of equality in the division of labour. Rather, while a relatively small number of contributors tend to be responsible for providing a relatively large portion of the code, the productivity of the core contribution group would not be as high, or of such high quliaty, as it would without the support from a much larger peripheral group of contributors. See: Raymond, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," pp. 30-31; Karatzogianni and Michaelide, "Cyberconflict at the edge of Chaos," pp. 35-36.

336Briefly, Fitzgerald points to the possibility that the growing popularity of FOSS means that increasingly poor quality contributors are being draw to projects, and that ultimately this is a numbers game that must work against the quality of the software produced. Additionally, Anderson, points to a similar number of bugs being reported in both the MS Windows and Linux OSs over a given period, though the user base, therefore bug reporting apparatus, is significantly larger for MS Windows. In this latter case, the given enough eyeballs... argument is actually turned against FOSS, suggesting that the purported quality of FOSS code is potentially an indication of less rigorous

365 testing. Finally, Glass has noted that the distribution of eyeballs is extremely uneven, with a large majority of FOSS projects claiming only a few active members. This prevents us interpreting Linus' Law as a generalizable phenomenon within FOSS, and moreover is a potentially problematic feature of the FOSS ecosystem given that code openness accomodates the integration of projects thereby acting as a potential vector for code contamination across projects. See: Fitzgerald, "Has Open Source Software a Future?" P. 97; Anderson, "Open and Closed Systems Are Equivalent (That Is, in an Ideal World)," pp. 135-136; Glass, "Standing in Front of the Open Source Steamroller," p. 84.

337Raymond, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," p. 29.

338Ibid., pp. 47-49.

339Tim Jordan provides a considerable discussion on the limitations and benefits func­ tionalization within FOSS contributor communities in his work. See: Jordan, Hacking, pp. 52-59.

340Glass, "Standing in Front of the Open Source Steamroller," p. 84.

341Rowena Barrett explores this managerial approach in her case study of Webboyz. Barrett's conclusion is precisely that FOSS type organizational principles work well when applied to rapid development, and innovation, but poorly when applied to meet­ ing deadlines and fulfilling specific functional requirements, for which traditional man­ agerial tactics work better. See: Barrett, "Working at Webboyz."

342Lerner and Jean Tirole, "The Economics of Technology Sharing," p. 105.

343West and Gallagher, "Challenges of Open Innovation," p. 320.

344Ibid., p. 320.

345Ghosh and Schmidt, Open Source and Open Standards, p. 2.

346Raymond, "The Magic Cauldron," pp. 156-158.

347Notably, the author discusses this point along side the observation that most FOSS users never bother to actually look at the source code. See: Matusow, "Shared Source: The Microsoft Perspective," pp. 329-331.

348This last point is well illustrated in Dirk Riehl's claim that, "Open source reinforces the trend towards employees becoming free agents." This conceptualization of FOSS as a breeding ground for entrepreneurship, or, at the very least, as a means for casting

366 off the traditional bonds of wage labour is a fairly consistent theme in much of the neoclassical and institutionalist literature examining FOSS labour, and plays directly into the sort of postmaterialist thinking which construes technological innovation, and specifically, the digital technologies of the information economy, as sufficient means for overcoming the, until now, endemic maladies of labour under the terms of capitalism. See: Riehle, "The Economic Motivation of Open Source Software," p. 31.

349Johson cites a 2003 study of freshmeat.com (a leading FOSS distribution site) showed that the majority of projects were essentially solo projects (identifying two or fewer developers), and that in a 6 month period, 97% of those projects showed no change or progress whatsoever. See: Johnson, "Collaboration, Peer Review and Open Source Software," pp. 96-97.

350There are of course notable exceptions here - most obviously the Mozilla suite of software, though due to the centrality of networks, and specifically the Internet, in computing, it might be argued that Mozilla's offerings are increasingly critical to the computer system, and are not simply applications. Additionally, OpenOffice.org deserves recognition here, as it is more clearly an example of application type software, and is an incredibly successful FOSS project.

351Raymond actually makes this accusation. See: Raymond, "Revenge of the Hackers," pp. 175-176.

352Raymond is quite clear on the fact that boring work is in fact often the most praiseworthy - a matter which is somewhat at odds with certain aspects of the ego driven explanation for motive. See: Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere," pp. 94- 97.

353There are a few more examples that are worth mentioning here. The French Mini­ tel network/service is an oft cited example of a technology that was appropriated in a manner not entirely intended by its designers. Originally intended to function as an electronic gateway to various commercial and government services in France, it eventually drifted towards becoming an ad hoc social forum - notably facilitating so­ cial protests, and various erotic activities. (See: Dyer-Witheford, "Cyber-Marx," p. 86; Castells, "The Rise of the Network Society," pp. 372-375; Feenberg, "Questioning Tech­ nology," p. 126.) Additionally, in 1990 a large portion of AT&T's phone network crashed due to an oversight in the design of the software controlling its switches. The software opperated as it was intended to, but a endless feedback loop, in which switches would continue crashing each other, was not forseen in the design. This error propegated from one switch across a significant portion of the the phone network. Finally, the Morris Worm was one of the first examples of an Internet worm - a program that propegates

367 itself across a network without the aid (and often awareness) of the people in control of each node. Though the Morris Worm was ostensibly intended to be a harmless research tool according to its creator, the logic governing the worm's propegation turned out to be too aggressive, eventually rendering it a sort of DDoS attack, choking out network connectivity and monopolizing computer resources. See: Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: p. 86; Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, pp. 372-375; Feenberg, Questioning Technology, p. 125.

354Raymond, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," p. 44.

355 As evidenced by the subtitle of his principal work: The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revoultionary

356Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," pp. 236-237.

357Raymond, "A Brief History of Hackerdom," p. 5.

358Text from the Jargon File (located at: http://catb.org/jargon/) has been italicized here. See: Himanen, The Hacker Ethic (and the Spirit of the Inforamtion Age), p. vii.

359Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p. 205.

360Commenting on Pekka Himanen's work: Weber, The Success of Open Source, p. 25.

361Italicized text taken from the Jargon File. See: Himanen, The Hacker Ethic (and the Spirit of the Inforamtion Age), pp. viii-ix.

362Jordan, Hacking, pp. 8-9.

363As an aside... In the process of revising this dissertation, my supervisor brought it to my attention that the term hacker was (and continues to be) used among golfers to describe a golfer that lacks technical skill, yet posesses a passion for the game that keeps them engaged with it despite otherwise technically poor performance. This usage of the term predates its association with computer enthusiasts, though the emphasis on enthusiasm is a notable commonality between the two usages. The specific affilia­ tion of the term with computer and IT enthusiasts seems to be traceable back to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sometime around the 1950's - 1960's. In this specific usage, the term appears in print in MIT's student newspaper The Tech in 1963 in an article discussing hackers at MIT compromising the university's phone system. Nonetheless, the earlier affiliation of the term with golf has essentially been subsumed in the latter understanding of the term, to the point where it is excedingly difficult to

368 find direct reference to golf hackers unless you are already looking for a linkage between the sport and the term hacker.

364Jordan, Hacking, p. 10.

365Raymond, "A Brief History of Hackerdom," p. 12.

366Raymond, The Jargon File.

367This statement is adapted directly from Tim Jordan's definition of 'cracks'. See: Jordan, Hacking, p. 26.

368The gendering in this passage is quite intentional and reflects the overwhelmingly male and masculine (and arguably misogynistic) composition of both the hacker and cracker subcultures.

369The term jailbreaking refers to circumventing measures (by various means) put in place by Apple that restrict the device's ability to run software such that only software officially allowed by Apple is able to run.

370Note that at the time that this was written, jailbreaking was considered illegal by Apple. However, by the time this paper went into revision, Apple reversed its stance on jailbreaking, deeming it legal. Apple's change in policy here ostensibly reflects a response to pressure leveled at Apple from developers critical of the formally closed architecture of Apple's software. The inital criticism of Apple's condemnation of jail­ breaking is summarized in: Lohmann, Apple Says iPhone Jailbreaking is Illegal.

371 Jordan, Hacking, p. 14.

372The Mentor, The Conscience of a Hacker.

373Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p. 68.

374Marx, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," pp. 473-475.

375Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p. 37.

376Aronowitz, How Class Works, p. 16.

377Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, 68.

378The creative class is considered critical for establishing consumer trends, especially among those who are peripheral to the core membership of this class. Further, following Glaesar's work on human capital theory, Florida asserts that creative people go where

369 they are able to most economically consume the amenities of the creative lifestyle. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, pp. 77, 259.

379Aronowitz, How Class Works, p. 22.

380Locke, "The Second Treatise," p. 111.

381 Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, pp. 275-276.

382Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 30.

383Bourdieu, "The Forms of Capital," p. 252.

384See chapter Symbolic Capital, in: Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, pp. 112-121.

385Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 106-107; The reference from Thompson appears in: Thomp­ son, "Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?" P. 151.

386Thompson, "Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?" Pp. 147-148.

387Carchedi, Frontiers of Political Economy, pp. 38-39.

388Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 9.

389Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, pp. 405-406.

390 Braverman makes this point directly, but construes it in somewhat conspiratorial terms whereby the apparent fragmentation of class is a strategy of capital. This is a critique of both Braverman and Marx that has been articulated by David Harvey. According to Harvey, Marx and Braverman tend to objectify workers, and in doing so present capital as an objective totality which is inevitable and irresistible. Essen­ tially, both hold a reductive notion of how political consciousness is forged (Though in Marx's case, Harvey suggests that this might simply be a matter of methodological ne­ cessity and not necessarily theoretical underspecification). In recognition of this issue, Foucault's language has been integrated to indicate the potentially unconscious, struc­ tural, dimensions of this phenomenon. See: Harvey, The Limits to Capital, pp. 112-114.

391Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 69.

392Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future, p. 272.

393Aronowitz, How Class Works, pp. 56-58.

370 394Negri, The Politics of Subversion, pp. 97-99.

395Marx, Capital vol. 1, p. 545.

396Carchedi, Frontiers of Political Economy, pp. 15-16.

397Aronowitz, How Class Works, pp. 38-39.

398Both Aronowitz and Negri mention a functional vanguard explicitly in their works, though this feature of their theory of social transformation is handled as subtly as is possible without resorting to its outright omission. On Negri's part, he is quick to address the potential theoretical and practical problems associated with the concept of a revolutionary vanguard, to the extent that he defines it in almost purely functional terms. See: Negri, The Politics of Subversion, pp. 139, 184.

399 Aronowitz, How Class Works, p. 58; Negri, The Politics of Subversion, pp. 147-149.

400Negri, The Politics of Subversion, pp. 47-52.

401Ibid., pp. 69-73.

402Torvalds and Himanen, "Prologue: What Makes Hackers Tick? a.k.a. Linus's Law," pp. xvi - xvii.

403See Politics section in: Raymond, The Jargon File.

404Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p. 70.

405Fitzgerald, "Has Open Source Software a Future?" Pp. 104-105.

406Ghosh, "Understanding Free Software Developers," pp. 34-35.

407Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: p. 97.

408Tynan, Should IT form a union?

409Raymond, "A Brief History of Hackerdom," p. 17.

410Jordan, Hacking, pp. 70-75.

411 Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: p. 124.

412Jordan, Hacking, p. 38.

413Augustin, Commercial Open Source in Europe Versus the US.

371 Biancuzzi, A Look Back at 10 Years of OSI.

415Weber, The Success of Open Source, p. 7.

416 See the chapter From Netiquette to a Nethic in: Himanen, The Hacker Ethic (and the Spirit of the Inforamtion Age), pp. 85-110.

417Ibid., p. 106.

418Use of the term egoistic here reflects a somewhat troubling trade-off between con­ ceptual accuracy and syntactic expedience. As used here it should be read as self- serving or selfish, and less so as, self-actualizing. The former terms were discarded because of the potentially vulgar insinuation they make about the willful intentions of the individual. The latter terms was settled upon in order to conceptually construct the ego as an agent.

419The most well known example of this kind of pejorative evaluation of cracker tech­ nical abilities is probably found in the phenomenon of so called script-kiddies. Script- kiddies are crackers that rely on programs written by other hackers or crackers to accomplish their chosen task. This form of cracking then lacks technical expertise, and the stamp of individuality, to the extent that it is automated via the work of another hacker or cracker. Notably, while there has been some interest expressed in the ef­ ficacy of various forms of hacktivist Electronic Civil Disobedience (ECD), for ECD to become a mass-action it is almost necessary for a similar mechanism to be imple­ mented. The pool of technically enabled and like minded individuals is likely far too small to be marshaled effectively as ECD, and as such, effective ECD tactics (the most high profile being Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks) essentially demand a prefabricated technology that can be used by people less technically skilled than hackers and crackers. In this case it is notable that there may be an ethical distinction drawn between the activity of the hacktivist and the script-kiddie. Again, this ethical distinction seems to correspond to pregiven ends that are treated as existing beyond ethical consideration. This draws out a further ambiguity in these sorts of politicized and/or criminalized forms of hacking, that being the distinction that can be drawn between hacktivism, cyberterrorism, cyberwar, and cracking generically. These are all technically and functionally similar - indeed often identical - forms of action, and the distinction seems increasingly to be a matter of perspective. Tim Jordan provides a largely descriptive treatment of these phenomenon which he groups together under the rubric of hacking the social. See: Jordan, Hacking, pp. 24-26, 66-98.

420Feenberg, Questioning Technology, p. 131.

421Weber, The Success of Open Source, p. 112.

372 422Weber, The Success of Open Source, p. 116.

423Stallman, Why "Open Source" misses the point of Free Software.

424Ibid.

425DeLanda, "The Politics of Software," p. 98.

426Aronowitz, How Class Works, pp. 224-227.

427Refer to the chapter The End of the Century in: Negri, The Politics of Subversion, pp. 61-74.

428Ibid., p. 79.

429Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, pp. 383-385.

430Aronowitz, How Class Works, pp. 164-165.

431Weber, The Success of Open Source, pp. 16-17.

432Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 236.

433Constraining consideration to the level of technology is absolutely critical here. Otherwise the hacker appears as a historically transcendental figure - which she is not.

434The most directly pertinent passages may be found in sections VI and VII in: Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," pp. 170-174.

435Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p. 278.

436Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," p. 172.

437Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Platueaus, pp. 403-409.

438Lessig, "Open Code and Open Societies," pp. 349-360.

439Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 86.

440See section entitled Why Many Other Programmers Want to Help in: Stallman, The Gnu Manifesto.

441Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 83-84.

442Ibid., pp. 192-194.

373 Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere," pp. 87-90.

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 169.

445Benjamin, "The Destructive Character," p. 302.

446Ibid., p. 302.

447Ibid., 303.

448Benjamin does assert that "... the destructive character obliterates even the traces of destruction", however, this does not undo this claim. In leaving practice as its histor­ ical artifact, the destructive character only leaves a non-determination - a non-thing. Benjamin, "The Destructive Character," p. 302.

449In developing his notion of habitus, Bourdieu notes that inasmuch as the habitus is a matrix constructed via the socialization process that functions as a principle of selective perception, the habitus' inherently conservative function (resisting alternate interpretations of social phenomena) becomes a catalyst for transformative action in the event where the individual encounters a dissonance between expectation and real­ ity. Bourdieu takes this as a tremendous blow to neoclassical economic theory, which presupposes a universal economic habitus. If this were the case, it would follow that so­ cial change is impossible (there is no conflict driving the process). Since social change is a matter of fact, then the theory is (obviously) wrong. Rather, Bourdieu suggests that there are many competing habitus that confront the economic habitus. See: Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, pp. 63-63.

450Negri, The Politics of Subversion, p. 69.

451Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 184.

452Deleuze and Guattari have suggested that traditional macro level Marxian class analysis only deals with molar levels and can only talk about struggle in terms of binary macro level class struggles when in reality struggle often takes place along lines of sight at the molecular level. At the molecular level there is always something that escapes (something always escapes) or flees from the conflict. These remnants are the basis for understanding countertendencies and further fascisms. Taking only a molar view ren­ ders countertendencies structural and determined and in effect renders them impossible by denying the agency of the individual living at the molecular level. Notably, as molar structures become stronger, they inspire greater movement at the molecular level. See: Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Platueaus, pp. 215-216.

374 453It is worth noting here that the manifesto is prefaced with the statement "The following was written shortly after my arrest...", and it's opening paragraph implies that the work itself was inspired by the arrest of some other young hacker.

454Jordan, Hacking, p. 10.

455Ibid., p. 40.

456Benjamin, "Critique of Violence," pp. 296-298.

457Holtzman, Craig Hughes, and Kevin Van Meter, "Do It Yourself ... and the Move­ ment Beyond Capitalism," p. 53.

458Negri, The Politics of Subversion, p. 189.

459As Dyer-Witheford has suggested, just as labour power is sometimes disobedient, so too is consumer power. This indicates two important phenomena: First, the reassertion of an extant class struggle that manifests in the sphere of consumption, to the extent that piracy becomes a means for satisfying social need under the conditions of waged labour employed in the service of capital accumulation. Second, an extant limit to the disciplinary power of the state and capital - and the culture industry in particular. See: Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: p. 119.

460Principle examples of this would be the development of the Gnutella network, which spawned Limewire, KaZaAa, and Morpheus (all of which became targets for aggressive litigation), the development of various DRM technologies, and of course the development of various cracks used to remove copy protection from software. (Most hackers would not consider the last activity hacking proper.)

461 As stated by Negri: "...actual practice completely supersedes law." See: Negri, The Politics of Subversion, p. 189.

462Arvidsson, "The ethical economy," p. 20.

463 Arvidson's The ethical economy: Towards a post-capitalist theory of value is proba­ bly the most to-the-point examination of this thesis, though its more sophisticated the­ oretical articulation is obviously presented by Negri, and to a lesser extent, Aronowitz.

464Benjamin, "The Author as Producer," p. 265.

465Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, p. 357.

466Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: pp. 127-128.

375 Feenberg, Questioning Technology, p. 140.

468Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, p. 387.

469Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p. 269.

470Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, p. 389.

471 With respect to this argument, Foucault's discussion on how criminality is con­ structed such that society, as opposed to a particular individual or institution, is vic­ timized, is quite relevant. See: Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 83-84.

472Benkler makes this point using data drawn from Eli Noam's research on antitrust and market share in service provision based on data from the FCC and DoJ in the U.S. See: Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, pp. 239-241.

473Freeman, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness," p. 152.

474Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: p. 124.

475Benkler essentially makes this point after noting the relative centralization of eco­ nomic power in the Internet, in an attempt to point a way forward to a more democratic technological future. See: Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, pp. 239-241.

476Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: p. 128.

477Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Platueaus, p. 17.

478Marx's detailed analysis of the labour process constitutes a significant portion of Capital, while the concept of the general intellect appears only briefly in the Grundrisse. See: Marx, Capital vol. 1, pp. 439-639; Marx, Grundrisse, p. 706.

479For Marx's discussion of the impact of the composition of capital on the rate of profit, see: Marx, Capital vol. 3, pp. 241-253; For Marx's discussion of rent, see: Marx, Capital vol. 3, pp. 779-907.

480Moore and Taylor, "Exploitation of the self in community-based software produc­ tion," p. 117.

481Negri has presented a very nice theorization of how economic, cultural, and semiotic forces are used to undermine the emergence of a coherent class consciousness. See: Negri, The Politics of Subversion, pp. 133-135.

482Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 239-240.

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