>
>Yeah, but that's not my open-source dick, its my "I'm better than all
>those ankle-biters" dick. Just about any "expert" in a field waves that
>dick around.
just an example of precisely what i'm getting at wrt a claim, in general, that the social relations of work involved in coding/programming/hacking/whatever are somehow about some special ethos that makes it, well, special and the next new thing and this could be revolutionary d00d.
chiding my lefty colleagues for getting so excited about it. (kendall, no you did not actually do this, but your response to me b/c opp for me to address the phenom more generally. it truly puzzles me that anyone here is getting so excited about something that seems utterly, absurdly mundane to me. the entire phenom is just so not gnu.)
dickslinging here, i'm arguing, is simply part of a wider cultural process that has little to do with men and everything to do with power. (yes, i was being hyperbolic, not unlike the man you worship, in order to get a little action going!). i am arguing that, in some ways, sharing code, collectively working on projects, and making it freely available is a form of 'check out how great i am and how great we are for being different and against the grain" dick slinging.
so what?
what's at stake if your good name get sullied by the argument that there is just a little bit of self involved, self interested behavior going on here and it probably isn't pure altruism coz, well, gee nothing ever is that simple.
sure, the giving away code and collabortion is done with appropriate rituals of deference and demeanor (humbleness) because it is also wrong in our culture to brag too much or in the wrong ways. you can see this among any occupational group, actually.
the process of cutting down people who aren't following the rules, rules that grew out of the chaos and anarchy of early hacker culture, is a form of dickslinging in that sense. it's not necessarily bad: it's a way to define the boundaries of who belongs and who doesnt'. it's inevitable.
>I think I mildly flamed you once for incessant name dropping on dc-stuff.
>Name dropping is a kind of dick^H^H^H^Hclitoris slinging. :-)
(old list joke and poke at yoshie who once told me i was rude and liked to fondle the lesbian phallus in order to legitimate my rudeness)
yes, i agree that it certainly could be that i'm dickslinging when i name drop.
but hey wot! hang on a sec! lemme respond like you guys to that. in that case the rant would go like so:
m,y language and the titles/author i ref is the world i swim in every day. can't help but use them because that's just "me" and i've forgotten that others don't necess. know them or might find that i know them so easily an attempt to lord it over others.
also, names are shorthand. i can say, Hi, My name is Kelley and I'm a Weberian" on a sociologists list and right away most people understand how that shapes my way of thinking, what kind of analyses i'll engage in, and perhaps even predict the contours of my debate with, say, a marxist influenced sociologist.
futhermore, "name dropping" isn't necessarily done to impress. it is also a norm of science in general, to properly credit the source of your ideas.
to an outsider, this academic style of referencing the theorists who influence your analysis, the sources of the research one draws on (and you have noticed that it's habitual practice in most of the posts to this list yes?) it is not really dickslinging but simply what we do. it is how we comm. with one another. to reference the research is to say, "here this the work i'm drawing on and you can check yourself about 1. how i've interpreted it 2. how i'm applying it here."
to acknowledge who your sources are is to open yourself up to further criticisms, not an attempt to shut down your critics per se.
(sides the only ppl i ever hear complaining about name dropping as an aspect of male oppression are whiney butt victimz wimminz studiez mavenz, matt. huh </flame tangent>)
but for me to rant on about all that without ever once acknowledging the form of power i wield (more precisely the structure of power i participate in) when i "drop names" is to grossly misrepresent the conventions of academia as somehow benign and unproblematic. they are not.
>Sure. The hacker/underground scene has a lot of dick-slinging, it always
>has. The "Computer Security Industry" has a lot more. Hell, look at the
>cDc - what'd they do - Back Orifice. 0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o. They are
>hackers that think they are a rock band, and sling a allota dick to prove
>it (not that there's anything wrong with that). Most website defacements
>are nothing but dick-slinging. So is virus writing (sometimes).
let me see if i can use an illustration i provided for reese once. he asked why i wrote 8k in response to that kid doing research on hackers. a lot of work and typing and knowledge i gave away to someone i didn't know.
well, he was touching on my dissertation. that's my baby and i've been working on it and perfecting it for quite some time. am i just a sharing caring chiX0r? hardly. i'm someone who loves what i do and thinks everyone else will want to know about it, who wants to help someone else if i can, so they can benefit from the footwork i already did just like i benefited from others, and i want to spread the gospel in some respects. and i get something out of it too: practice at arguing my diss, for instance. or just the chance to put all down in words to see how well i communicate what i'm thinking. etc. my recent educative rant here regarding "social engineering" and "the sources of the welfare state" were also about my diss and i was spreading the gospel according to kell! :)
none of those reasons are completely about dick slinging, but nor are they free of it. i am objecting to analyses that fail to capture the more complex character of what i see going on.
reese thoguth it was odd b/c people on dc don't share their haX0r knowledge with others. indeed, when a newbie asked they get flamed.
why the difference? why academics eagerness to share their extremely obscure knowledge domains. it's not that they're completely selfish or self interested boors. it is, rather, that a different culture or ethos can be observed here because we're mostly academics and this is what we do: spread our knowledge around rather freely. even when the goldang answer is available right on the internet or in a library. we ask and answer anyway.
now, on dc stuff if someone asks a question about "hacking" what happens? hmmm?
they get flamed, esp if the answer is available in the first 50hits of a google search.
why do you suppose that is? what function does such a norm fulfill? what purpose does it serve? why is it important enough to warrant the flame fests in one place and not elsewhere?
on a related note, why do you suppose that here at the high flamage lbo list have i never once been considered a hanger on scene whore just looking to hang out with the big shots and soak up their glory?
and why do you suppose that is quickly the conclusion that several drew at dc.
why do you suppose it is that the very same bh from me here as at dc stuff garners such utterly different responses.
is it sexism. there be plenty of that here.
NO.
it's because no one covets being an academic and so you dn't have groupies and scene whores. (or the use of those epithets as slurs) but people DO want to be part of the "scene" or, rather, become part of the hacking world. since there are no formal credentializing processes as yet to do so, there is the trial by fire that is engaged on lists, in irc, etc.
in both venues, the processes i'm describing are about power. again, power isn't bad per se. it's an inevitable part of the process thru which people define the boundaries of a group. even tho incredibly hard to do so, people do it anyway. they must.
>I objected to the statement 'the open source movement is all about dick
>slinging'. That's absurd, for the reasons I mentioned.
i'm tired of reading these siss boom bah cheerleader statements from people i think ought to know better. you guys at dc stuff are beyond hope. these guys here tho, they need some snititude. object all you want. i was being hyperbolic on purpose like someone we both know and love whose initials are dave.
>If you say "much
>of the computer 'culture', to the non-guru, is a bunch of dick-slinging"
>I'll agree. Anything predominately comprised of evil white males is
>dick-slinging, or so I'm told. :-)
no, again, slinging a dick around doesn't require an actual physical dick.
>But to people that use this stuff, and work on it, when you say "open
>source" we don't think Back Orifice, we think Samba. Or something like
>Venema and Farmer's CTK (Coroner's Toolkit). If it requires slinging
>dick to explain the purpose of these efforts, then I'm guilty wrt that,
>but only because I don't think I can explain it any other way.
nopers. it's not about that. i'm saying that i think its wrong to valorize the "sharing" aspect of the work culture. no human activities are ever that pure.
but what i'm getting at is that this was my way of entering into a discussion that i've been tossing ard for abt 6 months and that is my observations of this intense political struggle over things like what is a hacker? are white hat hackers really hackers? is open source the fulcrum of the revolution? is it socialist or libertarian or what? etc.