>
>"in some ways" is a far cry from "all about". Back-peddle to this, and
>you get no argument from me.
like the davester, i have no shame and happily say something extreme to get a rise out of people. i have seen, unlike you, dave doing battle with the reviled lefties on the list i run. so, i know dave knows how to shift around in his rhetorical style in order to push the buttons of different audiences. ask reese, kmart and cog. they saw it too. pretty dang funny. as i said already, the list is in the doldrums and had i said something non-confrontational it woulda dropped liked a lead balloon. (ask kendall, he's bumming coz no one responded to his politie post otherwise!!! :))
but, more accurately, in my response to chris i pointed out already that i was referring, first and foremost, to a general claim about geeks. i then threw in comment abt the "other" open source argument and its rather diff. take on "freedom" (see stallman's stuff on this). this is be/c i'm referring to an older list discussion and a broader way of thinking about this than you and chris and, perhaps, others here aren't engaging in. kendall and p.v. sure are.
my argument was in response to stuff said here recently and over the past year or so, ever since redhat IPO'd. it's an argument made by some lefties (here and elsewhere). they make the claim that geekdom (just for ease on the carpal) is the fulcrum of the coming revolution.
look at it this way. the bourgeoisie were the fulcrum of the revolution against feudalism, instantiating capitalism. the argument is that the work culture, it's ethos and values are in contradistinction to dominant capitalist values regarding property, work, etc. in 18th c France, the bourgeoisie did something similar. they emerged as a powerful, monied force that revolted against the propertied elite. now, the bourgs as individuals could be sliced into different kinds of bourgs yes? there were differences between rentiers, sm. business owners, and industrialists, yes? but there is a way in which you can characterize them as sharing an ethos or outlook on life, generated by and generative of their way of making a living. that is what we are doing here, in a sense. trying to discern if we can say that there is a general outlook or worldview characteristic of IT workers that is emerging and also if there are significant splits within that world view.
back to 18th c France. in order to fight the well-entrenched power and status of the landed elite, there was a political mobilization around a work culture that cultivated ideals and values--a general ethos--that they hailed as superior to those of a decadent elite: hard work, rational, planned long term investment in productive enterprises.
as an illustration: john k recently asked about why an author called the feudal elite "parasites". the author did because the bourgeoisie at the time saw them as parasites who lived off the productive labor of everyone else and contributed nothing to the benefit of the greater good. they produced nothing, while workers and small business owners did. now, we take this value for granted and nod our heads in agreement. at the time, it was highly contestable.
since you like adam smith so much, consider that he was taking a position on value precisely because all around him were economists rising up to say, "aha! value is not determined by fixed things like land, but by labor! or exchange!" for some, at the time, this was a heresy because labor was considered "dirty".
the rise of a powerful class of people who made their living from producing things rather than investing in and expanding their property, meant that such arguments were *very* political arguments because they either encouraged the claims of the bourgeoisie or fell down on the side of the landed elite.
given this little detour to explain that, while you and your buds don't see it this way, there are a bunch of people out there who do. some who are part of the world you swim in, some on the peripheries, or some who just take an interest in it because they studied political and economic issues like this.
i brought up open source because i was saying that it can't all be about altruism and giving and all that (as an alternative set of values to knock down the capitalsts in the same way the bourgs knocked down the feudal elite) if, in fact, there was a faction in the OSM who were hailing a diff vision quite compatible with capitalism.
and if you read stallman's stuff on this he sure as heck sounds like a utopian visionary.
> We've also moved discussion from
>"open-source developers" to hackerdom,
the discussion was initially about geeks actually. i brought up open source because of the arguments made abt open source on this list, an argument that i was too busy for at the time, but i'd been thinking about since. for an example of this, see nathan newman at The American Prospect:
http://www.prospect.org/controversy/open_source/ http://www.prospect.org/archives/V11-10/newman-n.html
others have addressed it, but i don't know exactly when and where in the archives to looks and since no search function......(dougdaddy??) i would be interested in what you have to say abt natha's claims.
the point, again, isn't *about* individual open source types or their motivations or even their self-understandings. its an argument lefties are having over what open source might represent or signify.
reverting to the self-understandings of individual open source types is not doing the kind of social analysis that kendall and peter and i have been engaged in. it's not unimportant to look at what open source types think they are doing, but social analysis isn't reduced to what they say about it either. (think of it this way: this is what dave does when he provides an in depth analysis of liberals. he says, while they say they are doing X, this is what is really going on. )
>I was just teasing.
yeah, i know, and i was giving you an elbow because i also think you miss the point that i just made *very* explicit. i was trying to illustrate how my defense of an academic convention can get pretty narrow and not particularly objective if i refuse to look at the bigger picture or from a different viewpoint. as such, like the mercantalists in _The Wealth of Nations_, my self-representation of academics and why they do what they do can be self-serving and not especially "objective".
ditto hackers, geeks, whatever.
it's an epistemological argument about reality and objectivity.
>I wouldn't be able to say, since I don't know the details or history of
>this list.
see, you don't necessarily have to. what i'm doing is applying social theory to an instance of social life. the individual details don't matter that much. but anyway.
> > and why do you suppose that is quickly the conclusion that several drew
> at dc.
>
>Well, you admitted that you were there to "study" or something.
noper. i explicitly said that i wasn't. i said that i was a tech writer which isn't accurate but then i don't think there's a label for what i do yet. but i do basically translate technical material into stuff users can use.
> Plus your lines didn't wrap until we flamed you. :-)
uhhh. i'd take that on the chin. but this is slam agst reese and i'll have none of that!! do you think that would have escaped anal retentive reese's attention had it been the case that ALL posts to the list were like that? believe me, he woulda said something! i'm sure reese will go back in his archives to show you that 99.736% of my posts to dc were wrapped. so there. pbbbbbbbbbbbbttttttttttt!! :)
>True. Compare "our" world to that of "she-who-cannot-be-named" (Reese
>will tell you who I mean if you don't recall).
wolverina? i recall her. heh.
>There is a fine line between hyperbole and a gigantic paint brush. Note
>that it wasn't just Susi and I who rose to defend open source. I made
>salient points earlier; there is no need to repeat them.
have you understood yet? the os comment was meant for a diff context, a broader and longer list discussion. and an illustration of something i just made very explicit. so i hope you get it now.
>Careful, though. Who does the valorizing?
Stallman for one. some posts to this list for another. they aren't journalists or outsiders are they?
>A lot of it comes from
>outside, especially the media.
well, you see, i'm a sociologist. i believe things can be said about people and groups of people without being them. not unproblematically, however. and i think it's important to really get down in the trenches and listen to people tell it as they see it. that's why i do "ethnography" --"writing the people"-- in which i record and transcribe every word someone tells me and talk with then for hours and hours. i try to respect their dignity and think that, sometimes, academics have loopy views of the world and that those views need to be checked against what people say.
however, social theory does not conceive of the explanation of social phenom as reducible to what people say abt what they are doing. (otherwise, no one would need us. heh. yep, i'm engaging in self ironic observation fully aware that what i do is fuXored)
>Yes there are media-whores in hackerdom
>(and media whores in the scene whores, the vilist of the vile).
well ahem, i work for someone some hackers call a media whore.
> But I
>think it is a mischaracterization to say that hackerdom and its
>manifestation in open-source is saying "look at us, we are so different
>than the rest of the world, we are so special, we like to share". I can't
>recall anyone talking about open-source as some kind of revolution to the
>world per se, in fact it is usually the opposite. "Open source software
>is bringing the collabortative practices found in academia to the
>art/function of writing and distributing software". That's more like it.
>The revolution, if you will, is not outside the software 'field', or, it
>can be said to follow other other info-sharing fields, like academia. But
>in terms of the software field, it is a kind of revolution against
>behemoths like Micro$oft, etc. A revolution in terms of the last 30 years
>of software "progress". There is a context at work, even if it is
>unspoken. I don't think any open-source developer thinks his software his
>going to end famine and poverty, or something.
do you see now tho, that there is another argument? and that we don't have to reduce this to what open source developers think they're doing? iow, the bourgeoisie were successful in their revolution agst the behomoths of the day because they had spokespeople--proto academics like smith and locke and others--who spoke for them and fashioned some of their inchoate claims into systematic social and political theories about the world. t hose theories then became the rallying cries around which political and economic revolutions were fought.
that is what is going on here and that is the more abstract level at which this argument is taking place.
>Even a zealot for the cause (the "linux is the perfect OS, even for your
>grandma who doesn't know how to plug in her computer" types) is still
>operating within that context. Open-source is revolutionary, especially
>to M$. They DO NOT know how to deal with it. The practice of FUD doesn't
>really work, although they are trying it. But that's the best they can
>come up with. Linux doesn't "play fair" as far as M$ is concerned; and
>the internet, which M$ purposely ignored until about 1996-7, the thing
>that has become ubiquitous with technology in general, runs more free
>software than NT. A "product" freely distributed, owned by noone, and
>directly controlled by the workers, is currently beating the #1 capitalist
>empire in the field, the one guilty of multitudes of unethical practices,
>the one owned by the world's richest man, in the most popular, fastest
>growing market in the world. That has to warm some leftist cockles!
>Sis Boom Bah, Indeed!
yah exactly. now take to another level and see that i'm railing against the leftists claims about all of this. basically, to really simplify this, i'm telling them that they are the adam smiths of a new form or new modality (hack hack c ough spit) of capitalism and not esp left in their analysis. again, that a waaaaaaay over simplification, but i hope you can see now how the contours of this discussion were shifted to the left a bit more than you realized.
kelley