Abstract

By looking at some lesser known writings of Harold Adams Innis- in particular an unpublished speech from 1943 entitled “The Crisis in Public Opinion”- this thesis hopes to bring a few good tools and frameworks to the study of open source, and vice versa. This thesis looks at open source in terms of the tactics and systems- technical and interpersonal- involved, and is premised on the idea that software is a media and communication system.

This thesis argues that, according to the open source process, and the writings of political economist and communication theorist Harold Innis, the creative commons is capable of constructing alternatives to “monopolies of knowledge” by protecting conditions for the freedom of thought. Innis spent his academic career mapping economic, political, and communication networks, and throughout his work he makes suggestions about systems (technical and interpersonal) that might intercede against monopoly formation. The communication and collaboration system that is open source is a contemporary manifestation, I think, of the tactics Innis suggests (with his words and actions) for surviving and redirecting our networks’ historical tendency toward monopoly and cascading crisis.

No One Knows Everything addresses the methods Innis describes for balancing out against monopolies of knowledge, and maps those mechanisms against some of the mechanisms of open source.

This is the all-haiku site she does with a friend, check it out. Also- look for her in each issue of Worn, laying down some fine fashion haikus. Thanks go to Serah, Worn boss lady and Open editor, for e-introducing us.
keep well loves, r.

I first read Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines in high school when my boyfriend at the time slipped it to me with a knowing smile. It was the kind of thing he knew I’d like.

I read chapters of The Songlines again in my first year as an MA student when the prof who was to become my thesis advisor put them in our course pack for The History of Communication. Professor Buxton was interested in the shape of the culture that communicated history, religion and geography in walking song. And we were both fascinated by the idea that the notes of the Australian Aboriginals’ Songs might mark out the highs and lows and lulling stretches of their terrain as well as contain the entire detailed history of their Ancestors and the ways our world was made.

Now, today, I am sitting outside on the weathered porch of a lovely and love-filled home in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, and I can hear kids yelling and laughing from the school across the way, and I am a very long way from my cold Canadian home and I have spent all morning curled around The Songlines yet again.

On page 162 of this Penguin edition from 1988 Chatwin says:

“My two most recent notebooks were crammed with jottings taken in South Africa, where I had examined, at first hand, certain evidence of the origin of our species. What I had learned there – together with what I now knew about the Songlines – seemed to confirm the conjecture I had toyed with for so long: that Natural Selection has designed us – from the structure of our brain cells to the structure of our big toe – for a career of seasonal journeys on foot through a blistering land of thorn-scrub or desert.

If this were so; if the desert (the desert that I saw stretched wide and dry beneath me as I flew over America and down to California) if the desert were home; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert – then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal’s imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings in a prison.”

I don’t know that I would find comfort in a prison, but then I am not an imaginary man. I do know that the desert, the few times I’ve been deep enough into its edges to imagine it stretching out around me endlessly, opens up long pathways and wide, unknown, uncontrolled horizons in my brain. In the forest, in the desert or on certain stretches of beach where you can only think about the ocean and the sand, my thinking is overwhelmed and gratefully awed and though I have no cultural history of ancestor worship I do feel vague personalities hovering around me. Maybe they are old forces from my old and sometimes strong and sometimes shattered networks of family. Or maybe they are other possible versions of me- the selves that I could be without all my accumulated style and habits and the ubiquitous assumptions of my society.

I’ve written before about writing and approaching writing with a moving methodology, and I’ve even dabbled a bit (inspired by Meagan Morris who was inspired by Derrida) with the idea of a pedestrian methodology- one that walks slowly up to and around a story or a site of inquiry and sketches the questions and tensions one finds along the way. This is also like a rhizome methodolgy- one that moves like beach grass or moss above and then back underground in unexpected but naturally interwoven progressions, and perhaps manages to shake for a while the strong hold of those old assumptions. The idea is that with this kind of movement you might find places in yourself that have been quiet for so long they were forgotten.

On page 164 Chatwin quotes a Moorish proverb that says “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.”

My passing thought here at first is a playful, personal questionning: wondering if a ‘she’ who does not travel is as bereft in this kind of knowing as a ‘he’.

And then I start to think more concretely about the things I learn about the value of humans when I travel. About how strangers flip suddenly into kindnesses, and alternately how good performances reveal their cracks and cruelties and quivering doubts eventually under the travel strain. And how so many layers of simplified assumptions that have been buried quietly beneath the patterns of my daily experience get shaken out by the astonishing variety of un-summarizable detail and uniqueness in the world of people I hadn’t met yet.

According to Chatwin (and so many smart others) travel, especially foot travel, is the fundamental process of becoming that all of our more modern practices play at, or refer back to. For example, last night we were playing games. A small gang of Canadian ex-pats who now live in LA came over to Jess and Joe’s place and we laughed and drank wine and played games that made us sculpt and guess at eachothers personalities and try to remember bit of high and low cultural histories. After the guests had left, we three sat around and talked briefly about how easily a ‘games night’ can fail. How strange and difficult-to-love sides of people can come out under the pressure of competition. How in games people reveal themselves- for good or bad- in new ways.

So, in this small way, games are like the road. They push us down certain pathways (in loops of tasks and steps printed in bright colours on a board, for example.) They provide the framework for certain encounters, and once we start on them we feel drawn toward the finish even though we are getting tired and quiet, and even beginning to feel burdened by a certain silly but real strain. These are pale versions of great old wandering epics, but they aren’t meant to replace them, only to offer us a training ground, and access to the deep and unexplored places in our brains. Or maybe they are only more examples of distraction- of the ways we have of sedating and entertaining ourselves so as to hide from the fundamental longing that would draw us back out to the road or the dusty pathways. Not that this is bad or weak. Not that games or entertainment or even, sometimes, sedation, aren’t exactly what we need to give pause to the buzz that we’ve accumulated and created.
But the challenge we might try to remember as we slip in and out of of our many small sedations and deviations is this: to open ourselves to the wells of astonishing sweetness and strangely familiar newness that accompany each and every trip. To allow ourselves to see the gaps and margins and variations that mutter through the numbing habits of the day to day. To see the stories we are in the midst of instead of just the stories we are fed, and to embrace the chances we get to change.

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.)

With a little more effort I can imagine a patron with his or her own nightmare history, and decades of burrowing beneath business, family, and donations to a local cultural center, who does not just want to shape the world with patronage, but who fears an image’s power to erase complexity. Fearing the way an icon can obliterate the grey places of history, the sorrow and goodness and mistakes of all the lives on both sides that remain outside the photos frames.

This sentiment, if it actually is a part of the tangled narratives overlapping around this event, would be understandable but still, I think, misguided. I think for peace to be possible all kinds of truth would need to be told. So much truth that it is in excess of the simplified and sticky stories deployed by power to justify violence. We need heaps of pictures and personal stories to wash over the edges of the isolated, apocalyptic ideologies that stand like towers on either side of this strange old Muslim / Judeo divide.

Hopefully, people with all kinds of memories of the stories that have been lost, and the pictures that go unseen from Israel, Canada, Iran and Palestine will come out into Montreal’s nightlife on November 2nd to communicate, and then to maybe have a free drink with me and listen to the furniture sing.

UPGRADE! :: NOVEMBER ::

This month the Upgrade! ushers in the Fall with the Montréal
launch of FUSE magazine. FUSE is one of Canada’s longest-running
English-language arts and politics publications.
Montréal artist and activist Freda Guttman will discuss her work in the arts as well as its
intersection with activism and technology surrounding the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In particular, drawn from the upcoming
FUSE issue which will be available at the Upgrade, the topic of the
gathering will be the censorship, at the Côte St-Luc Library, of
murdered Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi‘s photographs of Palestine.

In this capacity the Upgrade welcomes Kazemi’s son Stephan Hashemi,
who will speak on the issue. We welcome discussion and debate, and
will present an intimate and open atmosphere to pursue dialogue. The
free event begins promptly at 7pm, followed by an open bar after the
presentations with electronic furniture music from curator and dj
tobias c. van Veen.

WEDNESDAY, the 02nd of November, 2005
La Société des arts et technologiques (SAT) – 1195 St. Laurent
19h00 – 22h30 / 7pm – 10:30pm
GRATUIT / FREE
http://theupgrade.sat.qc.ca | http://www.fusemagazine.org

Also this month, the Upgrade, as part of an international and
ever-expanding network, is pleased to present three new additions to
its curatorial team: Anik Fournier, Ruth Burns and Sophie Le-Phat Ho,
three active members and organisers of Montréal’s arts and academic
communities. Stay tuned as the Upgrade gears up for 2006.

- tobias, Sophie, Anik & Ruth
November 2005

== HORAIRE ==

19h00 – doors open / ouverture des portes
19h15 – Introduction à Upgrade & FUSE
19h25 – Stephan Hashemi: Zahra Kazemi exhibit @ Côte St-Luc Library
19h50 – Freda Guttman
20h15 – table-ronde / discussion
musique avec dj tobias c. van Veen
22h30 : Finito

=========

tobias c. van Veen
Concept Engineer, The Upgrade! Montréal
tobias @ sat . qc . ca

Sophie Le-Phat Ho
artivistic @ yahoo . ca

Ruth Burns
ruth . burns @ elf . mcgill . ca.

In my new job I call up Montreal business owners and interview them so that I can write a profile about their place. Some are highly successful, some are high-end hoping for high success, and some are struggling. All are eventually excited to be describing their baby to someone who is not trying to sell them something. Once I make it past their understandable but tiresome suspicions, and they get that I’m just a freelancer getting paid to write an informative piece about them that will be published for free on the internet, we tend to have a good time. I’m not helping anyone really in need, but I do sometimes get to connect- like yesterday when, after three awkward and short phone calls interrupted by busy life and barking dogs, I finally spent some time talking to the elderly madame who runs a bed and breakfast on the South Shore of the St.Lawrence Seaway, just off the island of Montreal. She said things like “you’re a writer, do you ever write books about bed and breakfasts?” I said, “I could, I guess” and she said, “oh I wish you could see my house and my garden, I have 19 rooms to keep up here, you know, and I’ve seen it all come through these doors. I have had many immigrants with phd’s come here to stay, and once I had the mayor of Paris, I have all the documentation to prove it. You should come, and sit in my kitchen with me and I’ll tell you stories and you can write them down. People can smoke in the kitchen if they like, but not in the rooms. We used to let people bring pets, but they wouldn’t keep them in a cage and there were problems with pee pee.”

We laughed together, and she told me she wished she could see what I’d written, but she didn’t have the Internet. I told her, I guess I could mail it to you, if you really want, and she was so sweetly excited and delighted that she offered me a free night’s stay.

That small moment of excess (I mean how our interaction exceeded the limits of what I was being paid for) produced a small and happy glow in my head that’s been hanging around ever since. This woman went from being my toughest customer, the most abruptly defensive and anti-advertising, to being my sweetest memory of the job so far. She communicated in a wholly human way- going so far as to ask me “Who are you? Who are you really?” She poked me out of my telephone persona in the exact same way I’m always hoping to poke people out of business-owner-brain and into genuine communication.

I made mistakes in my interaction with her- it took me a while to understand that I needed to explain the whole idea of offering free information on the internet, and that I needed to speak clearly and slowly, before we could connect. I wanted to give up on our communication. I almost didn’t call her back that last time. It was a flip of the coin type choice that could have gone either way, and it’s success reminded me of that well-worn observation I heard repeated on TV the other day: That the harder choice always seems to be the right one. I wonder if the ‘right choice’ is hard because something in us is exhausted by the idea of the mistakes and repetitions and tangles that will be involved in interaction. I know that hardest part of my new job is getting up the oumph required to call strangers, and the best part is their surprising non-strangeness.

The second best part is how my mental map of Montreal is expanding. Yesterday, for example, I had to walk out to Parc Lafontaine along Rachel to run an errand. I’d walked this street before, but had almost no memory of it. I hadn’t been in to any of the shops, so they were all kind of a blur. This time I was surprised to run across two of the places I’d profiled. I was so happy to see them! They were real, they were even nicer then I’d imagined, and yet my profiles were quite fitting and so my communication with their owners (two very nice people) had in fact been successful.

It’s not my ideal writing job, but the way it’s challenging my spatial and interpersonal boundaries is very satisfying in its way. It’ll do for now.

Negative Capability: Unread Cultural Commons and Small Talk

you can read the other things we’ve had to say about the cultural commons here, if you like.

To complicate Cultural Commons further, there is the concept of reverse vicariousness. Half of the ‘commoners’ haven’t done their homework:

“Nonreaders can positively register at social gatherings that they “know of” the book without actually having seen or read it first hand. We might call this phenomenon reverse vicariousness, because we normally think of immediate viewing or reading as vicarious experiences for face-to-face interaction. But, in this case, a viewer or reader uses face-to-face interaction to experience the viewer or reader role vicariously;”

Kathleen Carley and David Kaufer, “Communication at a Distance”
Cited in Clifford Siskin’s The Work of Writing

It’s increasingly difficult to ignore the pervasiveness of reverse vicariousness.

I heard an NPR interview with the author of The Art of Small Talk. The book needs no introduction, really: it’s exactly what it sounds like, a self-help book for exactly these kinds of social or office gatherings. For instance, how to avoid being “held hostage” in conversations when one could be productively [grimace] networking.

Half knowledge, negative capability: able small talkers capitalize on it, synecdochal logic ready for deployment, to rush in and fill in the void. One half of a rug may be obscured underneath a couch, but you must assume that you know what the hidden pattern is. Bill Clinton, a master chitchatter, I’ve read, has on hand a humorous and engaging anecdote on almost any topic. A good small talker, I gather, relishes in this reciprocal state of half knowledge — and the real artistry comes in brushing up against but never crossing the boundary into any substantive knowledge of the other or betraying your ignorance of or distate for a topic.

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.

I think the ‘cultural commons’ is a generalization about the entire network of knowledge that’s ever been exchanged. I heard once that it’s easier to do the NY Times crossword puzzle the day after its been published, because the answers have been found and have increased in circulation.

I think the commons is an emergent property of complex human brains building and adapting with new evidence and experience over time. And this emergent, at-least-temporarily-agreed-upon knowledge is not a complete resource. There exist excluded individuals who have different knowledge about history, or human interaction, or their environments, and so the opinion circulating through the commons has always been prone to bias.

As different kinds of knowledge make their way into wider publics, they force the evolution of the cultural commons. They add links and chains to the minds and larger knowledge structures they interact with. We go about our days in this shifting context, trying to survive and thrive, figure things out, and make good decisions.

Mario Bunge writes, on the shaping of the mind system, that

“the human brain is plastic rather than rigid or elastic: it can learn and unlearn, perceive or conceive new items, and sometimes create whole new ideas. People reconstruct (rewire) their own brains as they learn and unlearn; and individuals with different experiences and different professions develop correspondingly different brains. By contrast, nearly all the other organs, such as the lungs and the kidneys, have fixed specific functions.”

Emergence and Convergence: Qualitative Novelty and the Unity of Knowledge. University of Toronto Press, 2003.

Brains can learn and unlearn. They can learn to accept a pattern and then learn to accept a better one and to perceive the differences. They can also learn to see cruelly, two-dimensionally, for a while. Hopefully, being aware of this possibility makes us slightly less likely to be fooled by unbalanced, unfair systems.

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.