by Risa Dickens.

Part 1.
Editing Openness: Lessons from Open Source.

I’m really glad Christian drew the issue of edited openness into the comments about space and scale which followed his recent post from Yellowknife.
Personally, I think a lot about how public spaces can become healthy ecosystems, instead of slipping towards inequality or control. I am half of the team that’s spent the past month building Indyish, and some of every day for the past two years building Open. And I am the one who most often edits our Openness.

Building Open is an idea that bumps up against every one else’s ideas about what Openness is or should be. Building this site and evolving it has challenged my own thinking-through of the processes developed in the open source community (the subject of my MA thesis, still in draft form). And that was sort of the original intention.

Often, questions ethical and practical that I’ve encountered here have sent me back to open source, looking for suggestions.

Open source development has played out in as many different ways as there are different, successful open source companies. For Open Journal I have been following the templates created by Open Source leaders like Linus Torvalds- the genius coder and “benevolent dictator for life” behind Linux, the kernel of the central open source operating system. (Linux sits at the heart of most open source-enabled innovations, including the Apache servers that run most of the Internet and the small computers that coordinate the self assembly of the floating blimps in Julien’s arty robotics.)

The collaborative process that built Linux is layered and complex now, but it still boils down to this:

Anyone is welcome to submit bits that they think will work. Linus Torvalds, recognized for having built the entire first draft of the kernel on his own, and for having made a beautiful and smart thing, has final say on what goes in and what doesn’t, and what needs fixing for it to work.

Decisions are resolved pragmatically- does this work well, logically, efficiently, does it work well over time, does it scale, does it allow for and enable growth..?

If a contributor fundamentally disagrees with the decisions being made by Torvalds, they are welcome to attempt to fork the code. “Forking” is to take all the openly available material from the Linux code (which is all the Linux code) and build it in whatever new direction you like, and see if you can get people to work on it with you. Forking is an essential function in the ecosystem that is Open Source. And it’s something we’re open to as well, because our interest is always in building and being part of healthy ecosystems.

The importance of the right to fork makes sense when you think about the open source system on an extra-large scale. (And thanks again the Christian, for drawing our attention to differences in scale.)

Thinking about open source requires a kind of sliding scale- one that can see the individual creative spark alongside the enormity of the network.

Open source is bigger than any one project, (and many projects, like operating systems, are massive in size); it’s bigger than giant networks of projects like Sourceforge; bigger than the legal and business realms of open source and things like Creative Commons; bigger than it’s subtle role in enormous battles like the ones playing out in the music and motion picture industries. Open source is big, and so this question about scale is huge because it points to how hard it’s going to be to build things that will survive the size of the open source network. Not to mention how hard it can be to know which directions will prove right in the long run.

Will a choice continue to seem smart as it gets applied to increasingly various scenarios, in all kinds of chaotic and tugging contexts? Will a system stay quick and light across the infinite variations of software and hardware?

Will an idea that seems brilliant to me in my bubble of books continue to be meaningful when it’s read against knowledge from other disciplines? Or will I then hear in it what I couldn’t before: the repetition of super-sized buzz words, beneath which I have hidden my secret confusion.

Sometimes I think people do this: bury big haunting questions in fascinating twists of words.
Sometimes I think this is the result of individuals or groups believing they should build an operating-system-sized theory on their own.
Challenging this misconception is, in part, the idea behind OpenJournal.

Part 2:
Our Working Philosophy.

As I wrote in the copy for Indyish, I’m interested in editors. I think everyone needs an editor- every idea needs to get shaken up by other perspectives and also needs to get reworked a few times by its original fashioner. Good, complex things don’t get built by one person in one try. As Torvalds pointed out, it generally takes one set of eyes to see the spark of a new idea, or to correctly identify the crux of a problem that needs solving, and another set of eyes to solve it. An organized but open network is necessary to connect the eyes and minds that together can solve problems. People, I think, flip back and forth between both sides of this job all the time, but wherever they are on that road they still need those other perspectives to bounce off of.

I want Open to provide the time and space for theories to be considered, tempered, and reworked. And I want the people behind Open to get to play whatever useful role we can in that process. And if at any time someone would like to fork the theory we’re working on, or would like to post an unedited version of their writing on their own website, or would like the entire history of the edits we’ve made together to be published alongside their final version, then Open would be super into that.

Part 3:
Why Edit?

Because we are trying to bring out the best in each other’s theory and writing.

Open is not just a blog- it’s not a group diary where anything goes. If there were no spaces like that- if it were impossible to get access to your own space for publishing on the web- then we would have felt the need to provide that. But Blogger, Myspace, and the Mac version of blogging tools – not to mention free and open source systems like Wordpress- answer that need bountifully.

So instead, at Open, we’re building theory collaboratively. And a project that big needs a project manager. And that’s been me.

Part 4.
The Flaw in Systems.

I stand by my edits and by the careful and continuously evolving thought that’s gone into Open so far. And in general, people seem to find the fact that an editor will look at their work to be quite reassuring- it allows them to take chances. And we love that. But it means that there’s always more editing to be done. And so it seems there’s a flaw in the system. And it’s a flaw linux encountered eventually as well.

Linus Torvalds is fricken smart but he isn’t perfect. (nobody is, hence the title of my thesis: “no one knows everything.”) At one point in the now-nearly-mythic linux history, Torvalds made some mistakes and got tired and defensive.

But actually, maybe this wasn’t a flaw. Maybe it was just the rumblings of a system getting bigger and approaching a phase transition. And maybe we’ve reached this kind of a stage with Open as well.

Expozine 2005
4th Annual Small Press, Comic and Zine Fair
Saturday, November 26th,
from 11 am to 6 pm
5035 St-Dominique (church basement),
between Laurier and St-Joseph

http://www.expozine.ca

Come to EXPOZINE, Montréal’s only small press, comic and zine fair! This
daylong event brings together over 160 creators of all kinds of printed
matter in both English and French.

Expozine was born in 2002 to provide a place where publications outside
the mainstream can reach the reading public. It is also a place where
members of the small press community and local writers and artists can
make new connections with each other. It has been a huge success:
thousands of people have discovered hundreds of publications, and more and
more people take part each year.

Montréal is rich in small press activity, with an internationally renowned
comics scene and a thriving small press and zine community. All of these
are represented at Expozine, and each year more publishers from outside
Montreal participate in the event.

We hope you make the most of this rare opportunity to see all of this
diversity showcased in one place. Browse! Shop! Meet the creators! And
most of all, have fun!

Expozine 2005
4e Salon des fanzines, bandes dessinées et petits éditeurs de Montréal
samedi le 26 novembre
de 11 h à 18 h
5035 St-Dominique (sous-sol d’église)
entre Laurier et St-Joseph

http://www.expozine.ca

EXPOZINE, est le seul salon montréalais de fanzines, de bandes dessinées
et de petits éditeurs! En une seule journée, il regroupe plus de 160
créateurs et créatrices de la chose imprimée, en français et en anglais.
C’est ce qui fait de lui un événement incontournable de la scène
culturelle.

Fondé en 2002, Expozine est né du désir de créer un lieu de rencontre où
les éditeurs, les écrivains et les artistes indépendants peuvent se
rencontrer et se faire connaître des lecteurs. Jusqu’à maintenant
l’événement a connu un énorme succès : des milliers de personnes sont en
effet venus découvrir des centaines de publications alternatives, et ce
nombre croît d’année en année.

Grâce au dynamisme du milieu de la bande dessinée et du fanzine, Montréal
jouit maintenant d’un rayonnement international. Expozine permet au public
de le découvrir et attire un nombre croissant de publications de
l’extérieur de Montréal.

Venez y folâtrer à votre aise, y découvrir des créations uniques et
rencontrer tous ces artistes réunis en un seul et même endroit.

I recently re-listened to Elliott Smith’s earlier, demo version of his song “Speed Trials.” Though the demo is poorly recorded, it has some noteworthy lyric moments that are, I think, more interesting than the later version’s.

Placing the original, demo lyrics in the margins in bold, the chrous of finished version of “Speed Trials” (as it appears on Either/Or) is,

It’s just a brief smile [crossing your face,] got stuck on your face,
running speed trials [still standing in place.] all over the place.

To the ear, it seems as if the earlier lyrics have been improved. “Crossing your face” is softer than the harsher and germanic “ got stuck on your face.” Yet, there is a subtle indeterminacy in the original line that isn’t preserved in the song’s final form. “It’s just a brief smile got stuck on your face,” immediately branches into two possibilities that are, wonderfully, left open. Is it “It’s just a brief smile, [that] got stuck on your face,” or “It’s just a brief smile, [I] got stuck on your face”? Both potential lines flicker in the empty space between “smile” and “got”. Even better, while the images are alternating (one a frozen smile, the other that first moment of attraction), they are at the same time forging — from that flickering — a combined image: an unstable, moving one that is both the stuck smile and getting stuck on it.

I prefer the earlier chorus then, but there is something rewarding in juxtaposing the two versions. As editors of manuscripts or theorists of textuality or bibliography remind us, texts are unstable, but examining that instability uncovers what would be lost in any single version. It’s a banal premise now, reflected in how common the practice is: Wordsworth’s Prelude comes in an edition including the 1799, 1805, and 1850 forms. Norton Anthologies of poetry reproduce (in appendices) canonical poems in various versions, with crossings-out and revision marks intact.

Thus, only from seeing both versions of “Speed Trials,” does it become clear that the smile is — to complicate matters — from the start, somewhat fragile and always on the verge of tumbling downward into its less joyous version, a frown. In version 2, the brief smile negates itself with “crossing,” a cross look. Just as it’s counterintuitive to think that a smile can cross (or dampen) a face, version 1 similarly undermines the smile in it’s own way, by grabbing its brevity and fleetingness by the collar to make it stick around — turning it into a forced smile (the kind one pastes on in job inteviews). Still, none of this to simply say that smiling is unhappy. Smith sings in another song,

“You see me smiling you think it’s a frown / turned upside down,” (“St. Ides Heaven”)

and there as here, the point seems to be that smiling is all the more valuable precisely because it can become a cross look in the short time it takes cross the face, or its honest spontaneity can get stuck into an insincere, meaningless smile — that smiling can turn upside down in an instant or else be virtually the same thing.

The whole song is below and there is more to unconvered.

————————————————
Speed Trials

He’s pleased to meet you underneath the horse,
in the cathedral with the glass stained black,
singing sweet high notes that echo back,
to destroy their master.

May be a long time till you get the call-up,
but it’s sure as fate and hard as your luck.
No one’ll know where you are.

It’s just a brief smile [crossing your face,] got stuck on your face,
running speed trials [still standing in place.] all over the place.

When the socket’s not a shock enough,
[you little child what makes] you think you’re tough, You’re a child because
[when all the people you think you're above,] You can’t remember what you were thinking of.
[they all know what's the matter.] Don’t ask what’s the matter.
[You're such] a pinball yeah you know it’s true. ‘Cuz he’s
[there's always something you come back running to,] He’s gonna keep on running back to you,
to follow the path of no resistance.

It’s just a brief smile crossing your face,
running speed trials standing in place.

It’s just a brief smile crossing your face,
running speed trials all over the place

In a recent post, Neil suggested that choosing “stupefying confusion” as yer axiom instead of clarity or fidelity might make for a good thought tactic. In a way this sounds like aiming low so as to not be disapointed, but this shift in expectation (which would seem to give up on successful communication with anyone but ourselves) is more like a shift in focus. By choosing stupefying confusion a communicator might actually be able to benefit from the fact of those mad amounts of detail that disrupt productive communication because they distract our gaze, shift our focus, and draw it out to surprising places:
“The particulate bits and deflections that deter much meaning-making across the commons (…) may be necessary for contact,” says Neil, and I think he’s right. “Communication is actually a compensatory enterprise that fails at the outset” say Neil and Virilio. I recognize that my communication is often flummoxed by the fact that I’m always kind of talking to myself. I get spun up in particulate bits and, according to this formulation, have always already failed.

I do sort of feel like communication is tangled up with compensation- in the sense that every communicative choice (fragmentary, half-assed, or sincere) can feel like a performance that’s prompted by (or compensating for) the fact that the other doesn’t already know what I know, or think as I think. There is a jarring gap between us, and we both need to be trying well to cross it.

All of our attempts at contact are like trapeze artists reaching out mid-air; or like martial artists trying to get their moves to connect in the midst of thundering motion, or like actors trying to find the way to say a thing that will make it spark for real. Or like a novelist trying to craft a story that will ‘create a light in the reader’s head’ (as Zadie Smith wrote in the sharp review of her own novel, White Teeth, and that Wyatt Mason quotes in his essay on her in the Oct. ‘05 issue of Harpers.)

Contact can happen in an instant, like when you’re sitting together and you’re making the kind of jokes that show you think and feel the same strange way about ketchup chips.

Or contact can happen slowly and complexly over decades and pages of texts and maps and plans. The ‘particulate bits and deflections’ might be pieces of larger patterns in other people’s or group’s communications. Fortunately, an out of context, brush-by communication or a bad performance still communicates something. Other people’s communication failure and success can help us shake out the bugs in our own thought systems- which is why Oprah, after decades making very public contributions to the commons, says she can feel when something has been said on her show that will save other people’s lives. It makes sense to me that someone in her position would develop some tacit knowledge of what large shifts from unknown to known feel like.

More then this though- failures (even small ones, like fashion choices that rub us the wrong way, like how Ugg boots or Oprah’s preachyness make some people annoyed, say) can make us realize that failure can be a question of perspective. Sometimes we are are just not the intended audience, and in these cases accepting ’stupefication’ or ‘confusion’ as our axioms, or just as an ok way to be for now, is a good plan. It leaves us open.

From this stance we have room to evolve: We can work to become the intended audience, if we want,
or work to convince the other to make messages that will have us as their intended audience. Or we can continue to widen our perspective, and attempt to access other layers of knowledge from the other that will be more succesful at connecting us then whatever the message system is that’s failing. (I remember, for example, as a teenager, realizing that girls who wore things like Ugg boots, and who could seem like complete airheads in social situations with boys around, could be capable of sudden, slammin’ articulations behind the gates and uniforms of our all-girls school. In new contexts, people say new things.)

Sometimes- in code or text, for example, or over long periods of time- we can micro-manage our way toward contact. And sometimes we can smile politely, give and get what we can, and leave that problem behind for now. Continue on our merry way, seeking out those people and moments of magical contact that make us happy or make us grow. Continue to prepare ourselves to be better at facing life and all its crazy complexity and unknowns.

Each moment of communication is part success and part failure, and the question then is what you do with the residue you accrue over time. And it is these layers of residue accumulating and shifting within each of us that are, for me (and Neil, Yohei and John Ruskin) the most interesting patterns to guess at, as well as the ones we are most likely to be wrong about.

The challenge with these slippery patterns (the sacred geometry of chance, as Sting called ‘em) is to remember what you have accrued in the past, and to improvise with open eyes in the present. This will determine whether you’ll be able to pull off a performance that you’ll be able to live with over time. Media, technology in general, are only extensions of the life-long challenge that’s going on in our own minds.
Any and every moment of interaction can either leave a mark on us that we’ll be able to build on and learn from, or it can slip like water off a duck’s back. And maybe the challenge of this elicits a micro management of technique. Or maybe it just names a tactic we already use. This is how our brain system works: together memory and improvisation constitute a kind of organic, hybrid resistance to the dominance of any one meaning. This is how we survaive the barrage of information that’s transmitted by the material world and gathered, amplified and exponentially increased by our media. In the ongoing formation of identity in our selves as we grow up, and in our societies this hybrid resistance is useful for everything from destabilizing a sense of superiority before it solidifies, to building a healthy personal morality.

And yeah, many of us feel we are able to summon this balanced brain state best when we’re communicating face to face.

In person-to-person communication we can receive and exchange waves of tacit information. Messages that are incredibly complex, and perhaps entirely impossible to transcribe are layered on top of eachother all around the material world and its inhabitants. Tacit knowledge is woven into gesture and tone of voice and the colour choices in a room. This fabric of tacit messages- this rhizome, if you like- is interconnected and changing over time. It is the atmosphere from which our more monstrously material communication networks have emerged, as well as all our great feats of understanding.

But that great contact that only happens face-to-face is just one example of a way knowledge gets adjusted (or distorted, or magnified) by a context (or media). There are other delicious kinds of contact that only happen in writing, like the novel that makes a light in your brain. If I were attempting to communicate the ideas in this post in the immediacy of a face-to-face situation I would have failed and succeeded in a whole series of different ways then I am failing and succeeding now.

I’ve written and erased each one of these lines many times. I have walked away, and sang along with the music I have on, and taken breaks lying on the floor. I have passed time looking at my own thoughts as they appear in writing, and watching them grow from half-baked to something with shape. They are moving just like ideas do everywhere, but in writing they leave a mark for others. And when I meet other people’s ideas in the personal brain quiet of written space they play on my emotions in an entirely different way. It’s like they’re stripped of something, and something is else laid more bare. There is space in text for me to ride out my personal emotional rollercoaster, and to get some perspective on my instances of knee-jerk defensiveness. There’s is time for me to catch myself in mistakes, and to lay down new evidence of subsequent attempts. And space for me to chew on things my fellow interactants have said, and to lay out the traces of some kind of response. And the ability to leave an idea when I’ve reached a logical end.

(i need to credit Paul Graham here- i have read his essay on writing and I borrowed the idea for the above ending from him.)

Here, with the slightest hint of cold (9 degrees?), the simultaneous and mass deployment of gear and ornaments that intersect in a fashion-pragmatism-use assembly is overwhelming me. Folks have busted out whole alternate sets of clothing configurations to address the aesthetic demands of weather in productive ways. Weather prioritizes a whole other mode of not only sign-value but also of habit and gesture as
expressed by the walking semiotic relays around me. The coolness is too much.

I am petty, yes, but this is how I spend my commute to York. I do revel in it; affirmation in critique! instead of an ipod to wash out the incursions, I may follow my friend’s advice and invest in a set of industrial earplugs. The tactic would not be an effort to negate the sonorized environment; instead, it’d enable and enhance touch and sight and smell and taste… Or not – but it’ll be cool either way.

I just hope i’m not blazed by a car while crossing a street with ears closed, though I did once fight the front end of a cab doing 55 with my drunken carapace and I still maintain it bent around me rather than I around it…a negotiation of asymmetrical vectors.

anyway, i work overnight at the shelter so i digress. gonna grab a few winks.

Neil.

Speaking aloud makes for a kind of alchemy between us. I become an improviser. I try to balance my knowledge of certain scripts against the possibility that I might be wrong, or that my interlocuter might have some entirely new bit of knowledge that will send my careful, youthful theories for a ride. Oral communication can elicit an open juggling from interactants, but instead it often just seems to startle and irritate us back into our caves. By ‘caves’ I mean the strange way I sometimes hood my eyes, and retreat into a kind of self-encircled darkness. I’m easily distracted by a tone of voice or a sexy flip of hair; or I’m silenced by the challenge of new ideas; or I hand over a kind of subtle control because I fear being disliked, or wrong, or misunderstood. And in those moments of divided focus the other person’s actual words disapear.

I’m reading a book now, Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian, which, according to the introduction written by translater Mabel Lee, is about the “devastation of the self by the urge for the warmth and security of an other, in other words by socialized life.” According to her, Soul Mountain is a novel about the fluctuations of control in the self, and the changing relationship between the indivdual, the collective, and the shape of knowledge they agree to.

The existence of an other resolves the problem of loneliness but brings with it anxieties for the individual, for inherent in any relationship is, inevitably, some kind of power struggle. This is the existential dilemma confronting the individual, in relationships with parents, partners, families, friends and larger collective groups. Human history abounds with cases of the individual being induced by force or ideological persuasion to submit to the power of the collective; the surrender of the self to the collective eventually becomes habit, norm, convention and tradition, and this phenomenon is not unique to any one culture.

Novels offer something different then the challenging immediacy of oral interaction. They elicit a different, but overlapping, range of potential power dynamics. The reactions they produce can be disseminated further then any oral communication. Novels are made up of incredibly long chains of logic. When they are successful, novels unfold complete other worlds- whole ways of looking at the infinite details involved in being alive on this planet. Novels require long stretches of your time, and over those ticking pages authors stitch and spread language, hoping to leave a path that’ll make your brain sing. For Italo Calvino the “canon” of great literature is like an evolving coral architecture: it is a heaping list of books that have set a critical mass of readers’ minds spinning.

This is why the Blooker prize seems a particularly interesting idea. Blooker prizes the best in novels written in the strange hybrid space of blogs, where time moves so much faster then in traditional media, but where it’s also possible to draft ideas slowly over time. Publishing on the web, with it’s deep digital dimensions, makes an increasingly textured space between self and other. It operates with a unique relationship to time, and as such allows the written word- be it code or literature- to engage our brains and our other complex machines in exponential ways.

Roland Barthes wrote that the first time we read a book we read ourselves. When I read a great novel, or begin communication with a new person, it feels like I walk into the text and paint old and new ideas, in response to the author’s words, all over the insides of my eyes. Sometimes I can catch glimpses of the author’s real message and intention- the other’s complete ‘other’ness. But mostly I read and laughingly converse in great swallowing lumps. And then I need to read the whole thing again, and then again, to see the unexpected complexity and deft intention that’s in there.

I imagine that novels which emerge out of blogging will eventually be so time-and-’other’-tested that they’ll speak to our contemporary collective realities in whole new ways.

But for now I’m reading Soul Mountain, apparently a Nobel-prize-winning exploration of an individuality that’s devastated by certain kinds of collective culture.
I’ll let you know how it goes.

Linus wasn’t an intentional revolutionary or anything like that, but his understanding of the different kind of success that might be possible with a committed effort of collaborative devlopment built something new. In this viral, communicative way I think Hiphop and Open Source share a politics.

At the core of open source are individuals and small and large groups of people discussing and building functions and systems and ways of working and making their conclusions open. At the core of hiphop are individuals and small and large groups of people building complex layers of rhetoric, argumentation, description, ideas, and systems. “When asked if there was an artist today who informed young people’s thinking about lyrics in the way that Bob Dylan and John Lennon did in the sixties and seventies Seamus Heaney answered:

There is this guy Eminem. He has created a sense of what is possible. He has sent a voltage around a generation. He has done this not just through his subversive attitude but also his verbal energy.”
National Research and Development for Adult Literacy and Numerancy

Hiphop, open source, and the exponential expansion of open source politics visible in the communal exchange of ideas on Rollyo, or Del.icio.us, or Wikipedia, or on the Wordpress Plugins Database, for example, are ways of sharing knowledge, information, and perspective.

The marketplace of ideas was challenged by hiphop: it was challenged by the new culture’s insistence upon telling the truth of inequality, violence, and the mindset that shaped the perception of life and life’s possibilities when one lived in poverty or in a world shaped by unacknowledged racial bias. Individual hiphop artists will not always seek to speak morally uplifting or politically challenging truths. But as a media formation, as a culture, Hiphop insisted (and insists) upon the right to tell stories, whether they’re pretty or gramatically correct, or factually true, or honourable. The right to speak back to the dominant culture, and to use the tools within your grasp to make your message heard, was thrown in the face of convential understandings of property at the height of the ‘Me’ decade. And the early rise of hiphop coincides historically with the founding of the Free Software Foundation in 1985.

Sampling brought into question the ownership of sound. Some artists claimed that by sampling recordings of a prominent black artist, such as funk musician James Brown, they were challenging white corporate America and the recording industry’s right to own black cultural expression. More problematic was the fact that rap artists were also challenging Brown’s and other musicians’ right to own, control, and be compensated for the use of their intellectual creations. By the early 1990s a system had come about whereby most artists requested permission and negotiated some form of compensation for the use of samples. Some commonly sampled performers, such as funk musician George Clinton, released compact discs (CDs) containing dozens of sound bites specifically to facilitate sampling. One effect of sampling was a newfound sense of musical history among black youth. Earlier artists such as Brown and Clinton were celebrated as cultural heroes and their older recordings were reissued and repopularized.

(…)

In the late 1980s a large segment of rap became highly politicized, resulting in the most overt social agenda in popular music since the urban folk movement of the 1960s.

-HeadBop Hiphop History (unfortunately, the images on this site could not be seen from my browser, but the writing there is excellent.

Hiphop is multi-faceted: it can connect with people who want to say something new with their bodies, or with the body of music and beats that has already been recorded, or with language, or with visual art. Any of these media has the potential to connect with a desire for a happier, wiser, more peaceful and prosperous life. Hiphop is even more ‘open’ then open source, in some ways, in that it can connect with poets and musicians and dancers and visual artists. Open source politics has the potential to connect with people on an emotional, conceptual level, but open source software actually connects those people by offering them powerful tools, and libraires of labouriously assembled information.

Before the internet, only a few people could own or access the means of dissemination of a new hiphop product. And, compared to the global population, the number who can now is still small. Record companies, including Russell Simmons’, are hierarchical (check out this great article by Courtney Love record companies and internet piracy). So is the current most-prominent means of communication: television. Without a production and dissemination system that reflects and reproduces the political message of hiphop- which is, in a weird fundamental way, related to the poltical message of open source- the power in hiphop is distorted.

Interestingly, Al Gore said a lot of the things I’d like to say about television and the marketplace of ideas in the speech published today on Beitbart.com.

Here are what I’d consider to be relevant highlights. I don’t know anything much about his business venture, but I think the way he is thinking about it and describing it are relevant to this strange, evolving idea about the relationship between systems which are oreinted towards two-sided communication.

”
Soon after television established its dominance over print, young people who realized they were being shut out of the dialogue of democracy came up with a new form of expression in an effort to join the national conversation: the “demonstration.” This new form of expression, which began in the 1960s, was essentially a poor quality theatrical production designed to capture the attention of the television cameras long enough to hold up a sign with a few printed words to convey, however plaintively, a message to the American people. Even this outlet is now rarely an avenue for expression on national television.

So, unlike the marketplace of ideas that emerged in the wake of the printing press, there is virtually no exchange of ideas at all in television’s domain. My partner Joel Hyatt and I are trying to change that – at least where Current TV is concerned. Perhaps not coincidentally, we are the only independently owned news and information network in all of American television.

It is important to note that the absence of a two-way conversation in American television also means that there is no “meritocracy of ideas” on television. To the extent that there is a “marketplace” of any kind for ideas on television, it is a rigged market, an oligopoly, with imposing barriers to entry that exclude the average citizen.

(…)

The present executive branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news organizations: from PBS to CBS to Newsweek. They placed a former male escort in the White House press pool to pose as a reporter – and then called upon him to give the president a hand at crucial moments. They paid actors to make make phony video press releases and paid cash to some reporters who were willing to take it in return for positive stories. And every day they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President.

For these and other reasons, The US Press was recently found in a comprehensive international study to be only the 27th freest press in the world. And that too seems strange to me.

(…)

I don’t know all the answers, but along with my partner, Joel Hyatt, I am trying to work within the medium of television to recreate a multi- way conversation that includes individuals and operates according to a meritocracy of ideas. If you would like to know more, we are having a press conference on Friday morning at the Regency Hotel.

We are learning some fascinating lessons about the way decisions are made in the television industry, and it may well be that the public would be well served by some changes in law and policy to stimulate more diversity of viewpoints and a higher regard for the public interest. But we are succeeding within the marketplace by reaching out to individuals and asking them to co-create our network.

The greatest source of hope for reestablishing a vigorous and accessible marketplace for ideas is the Internet. Indeed, Current TV relies on video streaming over the Internet as the means by which individuals send us what we call viewer-created content or VC squared. We also rely on the Internet for the two-way conversation that we have every day with our viewers enabling them to participate in the decisions on programming our network.

I know that many of you attending this conference are also working on creative ways to use the Internet as a means for bringing more voices into America’s ongoing conversation. I salute you as kindred spirits and wish you every success.

(…)

The final point I want to make is this: We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Worldwide Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it because some of the same forces of corporate consolidation and control that have distorted the television marketplace have an interest in controlling the Internet marketplace as well. Far too much is at stake to ever allow that to happen.

We must ensure by all means possible that this medium of democracy’s future develops in the mold of the open and free marketplace of ideas that our Founders knew was essential to the health and survival of freedom.”

The good things to be communicated by open source will be revealed with new successes of new projects and they way they evolve under the public gaze. The good we know of so far came from the responding ripples of innovation made possible by relatively small initial acts of trust. Art at its best is always this kind of fearless gift, and artists hoping to be great might do well to learn from the politics of Hiphop, and to pick up the tools provided by their strange cousins: the open source programmers.

MIT has lept onboard the expanding of the open source metaphor/process in an interesting new way by serving up the detailed class lectures and assignments for hundreds of undergrad and graduate courses. This large offering of powerpoint presentations and other digitized frameworks for lectures and discussions is a space-binding of all but the intangible bits of the oral communication that goes on in classrooms at MIT.

Open Course Ware show how knowledge has been ordered at MIT; how decisions are being made there about the boundaries between disciplines; or the theories that are becoming accepted fact. It’s a sharing not just of authoritative answers, but of the questions being asked. When these kinds of courseware are articulated to class or subject forums where the oral element of being in a class can also happen online, then the Academy will have come even closer to re-creating the layered system of open sourced communication that produces open source software.

There have been all kinds of disconnected attempts by individual prof’s to share their courses in this way, but by bringing it all together under the official flag of MIT, and embracing the the evolution of the idea of Open Source, MIT makes a decidedly cool statement. Some hackers may hate this, because it’s yet another example of the use of open source as a brand. Personally, I’m already neck-deep in Professor Eytan Modiano’s first lecture on Communication Systems Engineering, and I’m happy to be there.

If anyone else wants to try and “take” one of these classes and talk about it, feel free to email me or make your desires known on Open forums and I’ll do my meager best to make my way through it with you.

What I didn’t quite say in my first open source related public talk…

Well, I walked into the conference room at CRIM for my little talk about OpenJournaL last night and immediately began deciding to ditch my written presentation and just have a talk with these folks. The guys that straggled in were all different degrees of polite and friendly, bi-lingual geeks; and after a few minutes of programming-speak and acronyms it was clear that my communications theory about how open source interacts with monopolies of knowledge was the wrong place to start.

I left my notes in my bag on the seat next to Elran and stood in front of our very own Open projected huge and high quality on a giant screen embedded behind me in the wall, and faced the room of linux users and local leaders with only a few laptops and a small mic between us. I started out just trying to introduce the idea of the site: our intention to open up the act of writing, and to open up boundaries between disciplines, and to draw open source into the communication discourse in some different ways.

(communication discourse: all those people and texts that talk about communication. The field of Communication Studies)

At Open we’re trying to make a space that bridges huge communication gaps between geeks of different kinds (theory, literature, health, law, or code geeks), and between geeks and non-geeks. And the deep need for this kind of space was made all the more evident by the few gaps and snags we met, and collectively surpassed, last night.

The most interesting moment for me was in a back and forth with Brad from Ubuntu and Hubert, an independent software consultant, about how personal ego and programmer-brain can get in the way of the expansive potential of open source. We talked about how the design of a graphic user interface- the face of the software being made, or of the bug-reporting site for the software- can fail to communicate with Others who aren’t already part of the in-club. And this echoed the comments I’d already made about my intentions with the evolving design of Open- of trying to keep some white space, and of trying speak in a language that’s not too theory-y and alienating.

The interesting thing to realize is that we all have this potential to speak in domain-specific or peer-specific language. We all know specialized terms, and we can all get so used to them we forget how they sound to an equally-intelligent outsider. It is even possible to assume that we understand each other, because we translate their phrases through our own assumptions and biases. (Never assume, my grade 8 teacher told the class, or you’ll make an ass out of u and me.)

For example, have you ever watched a television show with other people and realized by the way they are making fun of it that they are missing some information about how it works, or what its intention is, or what the real character relationships are? Or have you ever realized in the middle of a fight (with your mom, say) that the other person isn’t accusing you of the thing you are angrily defending yourself against? We have no means of ‘perfect’ communication between humans, we’re all alone in these bodies of ours, we make mistakes all the time.

The two examples I just described are situations where the gap between the message sent and the message being received becomes apparent, but what happens when it doesn’t? And how do media – the systems we build to enable and extend this flawed communication of ours – interact with our messages? Harold Innis, my favorite communication theorist, says that media distort knowledge when they are structured by monopolies. He suggests we think about how personalities are distorted by power, and how they then support the formation and expansion of monopolies of knowledge (PE in the MS, intro.). A monopoly of knowledge is a fixed version of reality determined by the communicative choices made by an elite (regulations, protocols, etc.) A monopoly of knowledge is formed by the means of communication becoming un-accessible: one-sided. And eventually it is brought down by force.

My suggestion, based on Innis’ theories about public opinion and crisis, is that the open source process offers us the best means of deflating that tendency. Open source software will be continuously improved by surprising perspectives, and so will produce layered media for open source communication- beyond the desktop, or the browser, or the website, other means and metaphors for the network will emerge. This communication will have the potential to bridge gaps in communication (like Unicode already does) but will build layered ways for this to happen over time: gradually and in fits and starts opening up communication between math and other kinds of languages, and between cultures, and between genders.

I hope some of this came across last night, but every failure makes the usefulness of the evolving space/metaphor that is OpenJournaL more apparent.