<>-- Foucault said that, some day, the people will discover the tools they need.


I wake up. Make myself a cup of coffee. Boot up, get a chair, sit down, log in, drawn in by a cyborgian urge to enter cyberspace. First level of contact: TCP/IP – the tool we use to make sure our tools, our prosthetic extensions, speak the same language. Admission granted. By default. For free. Get in. Move forward. Enter the Web of hyper-connections where no destination is certain, yet any destination is possible. Go anywhere. Proceed? Yes. Second level of contact: HTTP – the tool we use to make sure our tools, our prosthetic extentions, speak the same language. Admission granted. Automatically, For free. Digression: Met Jane yesterday. Want to talk to her again. This is the Mutt/VIM space. The Sendmail planet. The Jabber galaxy. The LiveJournal universe. Ping! Jane?....Fast forward thirty minutes. Time to hit the road. Disconnect. Am off now. Into the street. Back into the crystallised, polarised collage of contradictions that the Matrix, ultimately, is. Turn left, then right, and get into that building. Office room 101, knock on the door once, ask for permission, and depending on reply received either walk in or....I'm in. Having to assist Case in burning Chrome.[1] What we're now in need of is a radical tool – a tool we can use to make sure our tools, our prosthetic extensions, are not numbed by the incompatible dialects spoken by those frequenting the Babel Shopping Centre. Dyne:bolic. OpenSSH. Dig it. Done. Intermediation of signs and gestures. Handshake. Transfer completed. My account balance has cheered up. Time to go. Leave the exchange economy behind. No more staged console cowboy gigs for today. Take a taxi. Back to Arkheim. Back to my recently upgraded apartment. Spin the loop. Twice. Am back online. Defined by the digital condition. Copy and paste. Link and post. Blog this. Blog that. Blog back. Share. And then, share some more. Gnutella. Freenet. BitTorrent. Were he alive to see this massive re-conceptualisation of the cultural sphere, and witness the spirit of protestantism toppled by the ethic of sharing, Matthew Arnold [2] would have shot himself in the face, gone ecstatic by the sheer feeling of unrestrained possibility openning up in peer-to-peer networks. Foucault was wrong. The people never discovered the tools - they had to build them themselves. Now it is only a matter of time until we learn how to use them.

That is one reason why free software is truly subversive. Not because hackers, due to their mass media portayal, encapsulate the image of the lone revolutionary better than other subcultural icons or comic book heroes much like Batman. And not only because free software is, contrary to what some people would like us to believe, indeed, “free beer”. But because free software, above and beyond all other things, is free people collaborating to build tools not in order to eke out a profit, but to use them. “Let us imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour- power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force”.[3] The radical implications of the shift in collective subjectivity arising from people, who, en masse, use the tools they need to create new situations they individually desire is compelling enough to tremble the earth. Let us recall these words from a black worker to a white boss: “When we first saw your trucks and planes we thought that you were gods. Then, after a few years we learned how to drive your trucks, as we shall soon learn how to fly your planes, and we understood that what interested you most was manufacturing trucks and planes and making money. For our part, what we are interested in is using them. Now, you are just our metal-workers.”[4] The emancipatory force of the reversal of perspective is upon us. Now it's time we put it to use before it all fades away into spectacular success stories centred on ingenious hacker-enterpreneurs and nonsensical information societies.

Notes

[1] Case is the name of the main character in William Gibson' s legendary sci-fi novel Neuromancer (1984) which is being credited for coining the terms cyberspace and matrix. Burning Chrome is one of Gibson's short novels telling the story of two hackers who are being paid to destroy Chrome – a powerful lifeform that cannot be defined or understood as either purely physical (human – organic), nor as a solely digital and/or synthetic (ie., a cybernetic system) being.
[2] See Matthew Arnold. Culture and Anarchy. Third edition (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1882) at http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/nonfiction_u/arnoldm_ca/ca_titlepage.html
[3] p.171, Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.1
[4] Quoted in Raoul Veneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life ((Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations), 1972, Ch.9, at http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/39

8:07:04 PM    Say it loud  []  Trackback  []  

and now, goteborg university issued an open invitation to cyberians to participate in their course on open source/free software: philosophy and theory, which, to my knowledge, is the first university course ever premised entirely on theoretical aspects centred on free software. in addition, the entire course is being delivered online. way to go people. count me in.

6:45:41 PM    Say it loud  []  Trackback  []